Go (or Golang) is a programming language that we’ve adopted into our tech stack because it’s fast, secure, and very powerful when used correctly. It runs well even in containers or on virtual machines. If you need a practical language with a focus on concurrency and scale, Go development services might be your best option. Let’s take a closer look at what makes it such a good choice for many development projects.
The Go programming language - the new go-to technology for commercial app development
Go is fast and supports relatively simple code. Apps written in Go compile at the command line on all platforms and hardware. They don’t need an interpreter or a virtual machine, they work fast and start up quickly. And the tech stack can be fairly minimal.
Go is a static-typed language. This means that many simple bugs can be caught during checking by the compiler - which has the potential to save you time and money. Go also has a garbage collector. It keeps track of what goes on in the code and periodically removes elements that are no longer needed, on its own.
Go is very flexible - it can be used for system and network programming, ML (machine learning), big data, video and audio editing software, web solutions, and many other types of apps.
Go is powerful and offers high-performance networking. It outperforms Java, which makes it a likely candidate for the standard enterprise language of choice in the near future. Multiple open source projects are already written in Go, including Kubernetes and Docker.
Go comes with built-in memory safety. It supports proper management of allocated memory, and thanks to goroutines (used like threads, only with lower RAM requirements), Go-based apps aren’t likely to crash because of a lack of memory. Additionally, apps built with Go tend to run on less powerful infrastructures, including on older devices.
Go was built for multiprocessing, concurrency and parallel programming. It’s major strength is that it can leverage the potential of multiple cores and processor resources. It can be used for running single-process apps in the background, but scaling up also isn’t a problem. Thanks to concurrency, we can delegate tasks to multiple machines in our network, getting the computation result more quickly.
Who can benefit the most from using Go
If you’re building one of the following types of solutions, consider using Go:
1. Apps that perform many concurrent tasks that can be broken down into separate microservices;
2. Solutions that handle many network requests at once. Examples include streaming services, chat solutions and chatbots, as well as automation for network-based operations (alerts with many receivers, low-latency monitoring systems);
3. A solution for a business that prioritizes code safety and memory leak prevention;
4. Communication and online collaboration tools.
Which industries can get the most out of Go? Social media and finance are the two major examples. YouTube, SoundCloud and Netflix already use Go to reduce loading time, or deploy smaller internal services. Fintech has to provide constant access to financial data to users, and because this is sensitive information, it should be delivered through a secure, reliable connection. PayPal uses Go to improve capacity, make maintenance easier, and support scaling.
Ready to get started on your new Go project? Work with a team of experiences senior developers.
iRonin.IT has practical experience with Go implementations, and a high percentage of senior-level developers on each project team.
