Introduction to Golang

What is Golang?

Golang is a concurrent open source programming language supported by Google in 2009 and created by a small team that includes Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson.

• Golang is considered a language that sits between C and C++.
• It's fast, has a simple syntax, is functional, compiles to C-like assembly, has a garbage collector, and powerful C++ like native libraries.
• It also aimed to be modern by supporting connected and multi-core computing.

Let’s further look into this and read a few more facts about Golang.

Prerequisites

• Some programming experience: It's good if you have some programming experience to start with, but it's not mandatory as golang code is simple to grasp.
• A text editor: Text Editor like VS Code, or you can also use golang official playground or other. A command terminal: Go functions admirably, utilizing any terminal on Linux and Mac, and PowerShell or cmd in Windows.

The Motivation Behind its Creation

The main purpose of creating Go is to solve software engineering issues and also provide an alternative to C++. Some other reasons are :

• Need for quicker programming advancement
• The need for effectiveness and simplicity of programming
• Support for memory management Let's discuss it a little more in detail,

Need for Quicker Programming Advancement

In contrast to computing power, programming advancement has not become significantly quicker or more fruitful(considering the number of failed projects in C/C++), while applications fill in size. Therefore, a new low-level language was needed, furnished with higher ideas.

Need for Effectiveness and Simplicity of Programming

Before using Go, an engineer must make a trade-off between maintainability and speed of execution. At this stage, Go is an endeavor to join every one of the three wishes: quick compilation, fast execution,, and simplicity of programming.

Support for Memory Management

Since memory issues (memory spills) are a long-term issue of C++, Go's creators concluded that memory management should not be the responsibility of a developer. So although Go executes local code, it runs in runtime, which deals with efficient and quick garbage collection.

Why Learn Golang?

So, you might be thinking, why should I go for golang? Is it a good programming language to learn? The reason you can refer here for your Go language.

• Basic sentence structure - Go has a compact and clear syntax that makes it readable and viable code simple.
• Static linking - The compiler upholds static linking, which implies you can statically link your task into a massive binary and afterward just deploy it to the cloud or a server.
• Job Demand - Many companies across a wide spectrum of industries operate on the web and need to scale, there are over 20,000 job postings available for Go programmers.

Additionally, Golang usage is expanding globally, particularly in the field of cloud computing. There are also other significant Go-based cloud infrastructure projects, including Docker and Kubernetes. Google, Twitch, Uber, Medium, Adobe, Netflix, SoundCloud, Dailymotion, and many other well-known IT businesses use Golang. The future of Golang is more promising than ever because of the dominance of the cloud and DevOps.

This blog's goal is to introduce all of Golang's fundamental ideas. So let's make Golang simpler!

Beginning With Go Programming

There are different web-based IDEs like The Go Playground, repl. it, and so forth, which can be used to run Go programs.

For local setup, there are 2 pre-requisites, a text-editor and a go-compiler,

Text Editor: It gives you an editor to write your code.

Go Compiler: Go circulation comes as a paired installable for FreeBSD (discharge 8 or more), Linux, Mac OS X (Snow Leopard or more), and Windows working frameworks with 32-bit (386) and 64-cycle (amd64) x86 processor designs.

For more info, you can refer here to the installation section. Here is the list of the best Golang IDEs to be used for Go development:

• Visual Studio Code
• LiteIDE
• Goland
• Vim
• Eclipse with GoClipse
• Komodo
• Sublime Text with GoSublime
• IntelliJ IDEA
• Atom with Go-plus Plugin

List of the best Golang development tools:

• Go, Vendor
• Gonative
• Checkstyle
• Go-Swagger
• Go Meta Linter
• Gosimple

First Program in Golang!

greetings.go

Output

Run the code!

To run this program, you must first install Golang, which you can verify by running the go version command, and then run go run helloworld.go after filling in this content. You ought to see the output in the terminal.

Explanation of the above code :

• import keyword is how we add code from other packages to use with our program.
• package defines which code bundle this file belongs to.
• fmt  stands for formatting. It is the default library for input and output in Go.
• main function  is the start of a program's execution.
• fmt.Println() is a standard library function to print something as an output in Golang.
• In the above program, we are using Println which means a print line, used for printing `Welcome to scaler, Let's learn Golang! text.
• In the "main" function, the fmt package was then used to output our Welcome to scaler, Let's learn golang! text to the console.
• To run the above code, in your terminal, type go run greetings.go, and hit enter. You can also name your file whatever you like. Just name it and run yourFileName.go.

“Hello World” in Go:

Run the Code!

Comments in Golang

Go supports 2 types of comments.

1. Single Line Comment

Syntax:

// single line comment

2. Multi-line Comment:

Syntax:

/* multiline comment */

Advantages of Golang

Simple Code:

Golang code is simpler and combines ideas from various other programming languages. This has several advantages because it saves developers a massive amount of time by having them navigate fewer lines of code. This takes very less time to read code which is time-consuming in other languages.

Powerful Performance

It supports shorter software development lifecycles, runs and compiles more quickly, and is simple to support and maintain. Golang offers an even greater speed benefit because it doesn't use Virtual Machines and instead compiles directly to machine code.

Large-scale Projects:

Golang is mainly considered for large and complex projects. Go is a programming language of the future because it is scalable and allows for the execution of several functionalities at once. Also, it has goroutines that replace threads and need much less RAM, and wastes very less memory.

Compiled language:

Go is a compiled language that makes it fast i.e code is first complied(translated) to the processor before running, unlike an interpreter which compiles during runtime. Go has been proven to be faster than Java.

Who uses Golang?

• Google made many components in go for youtube.
• Netflix uses golang for connection management.
• Uber to scale its geofence microservice, which increases service delivery speed. 
• Golang which uses golang itself.
• Dropbox uses Golang.
• Kubernetes uses golang.

Other things in which Golang is widely used:

• Utilities and Stand-Alone Tools
• News Outlets
• Media Platform
• Distributed Network Services (DNS)
• Cloud-Native Development 
• Replacements for Existing Infrastructure