Go Features

Go features

Let’s take a look at what features distinguish Go from other programming languages.

Statically typed

Go is a statically typed programming language. This means that all variables we declare have their data type, which can be any user-defined type, such as int or string.

Compiled

Go is a compiled language. When we finish developing our Go program, we will have to run our source code files through a compiler that reads the source code and generates a binary (or executable). The big advantage of a compiled program is that the source code is transformed into machine code, which can perform incredibly fast. Here are two advantages that the Go compiler offers:

• Error checking: It can spot errors while we’re typing. Keep in mind that errors should be found as early as possible.

• Optimization: Compiled programming languages are faster than interpreted languages. Checks are done when compiling the code instead of during execution.

Garbage collection

The term “garbage” refers to unused objects that have been created in memory but are no longer used by our program. Therefore, they’re good candidates for being wiped out. The mechanism that will take care of this is known as garbage collection. Every time it finds allocated space that is no longer needed, it deallocates it to make that location available to store other data.

Why is Go so popular?

Below is a list of reasons that could drive you in choosing Go for your next project:

• Simple: We can achieve our objectives without any extra complexity.

• Good documentation: It has easy-to-read and understandable documentation. Moreover, there are plenty of tools that support development, debugging, and deployment.

• High portability: It offers amazing portability as it can be compiled and run on all major operating systems.

• Market: There’s an increasing demand for Go developers. Moreover, the salary for Go developers has also followed increased.

• Microservices architecture: It fits very well in the architectures that have been adopted by companies, and it makes it easy to manage complex solutions.

• Multithreading and concurrency: Go is one of the smartest languages when dealing with multithreading and concurrency. It can run concurrent code efficiently and allows us to exploit the multithreaded architecture that powers our machines.

• Libraries: Go has a lot of amazing libraries that we can rely on to achieve our needs.