Introduction: From my last blog, you may already have an idea about Go (Golang) one of the badass programming language available in the industry today. Go has a straightforward syntax, in-built concurrency capabilities, and a clear emphasis on readability and efficiency, making it a language that has revolutionized the way developers work, around the globe.
History and Background of Go
Go, often known as Golang, is a product that originated from a Google team composed of Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson, and it was designed to improve the development of applications in the face of difficulties in scalability. Go was first released to the public in 2007, with the first announcement to the public made in 2009. It has become quite a hit and has been garnering substantial attention among developers from all over the globe.
Go was designed to include many of the benefits of other languages, I never intended to make it LOOK like any one language, but to feel like designing a language with easy learning and use, but also high performance to target modern software development materials. The team took good features from the existing programming languages like C, Pascal, and Modula, and omitted all features not necessary for C++ due to the complexity of new features.
Go: designed for simplicity × It is written with a very clean and readable syntax. By keeping it simple in this way not only is there a smaller learning curve for new developers but the maintainability of the codebase becomes more sound as well.
Go Benefits and Features
With a variety of features and benefits, togelup Golang proves to be one of the widely using programming languages. Go is best known for its amazing performance. The language is also a compiled language, the code that you would write is translated to machine code before execution so should compile eventually faster that an interpreted language. To reduce the chances of memory leaks, Go’s garbage collector is known to be memory efficient during memory allocation & deallocation.
Concurrency is another major win for Go. Goroutines Gives us ability to run the task concurrently however go means concurrent (It is bits advanced area in go land). The efficiency of goroutines mean that we can write concurrent code with the structures of programming simpler than the traditional threading model. This enables the writing of scalable, responsive applications.
Go is strongly focused on simplicity and readability as well. The language is a small language with consistent features that makes it easy to learn and has few surprises. The Go syntax is clean, and easy to read and write making it efficient and productive on a code level with a greater maintainability as it is easy to read. x Go Installation Move to Top Part 1 — Installing Go and setting up the environment Pranjal Dec 15·5 min read.
You might want to set up your development environment before you jump right into programming Go. Thankfully, Go comes with an easy installation for many operating systems.
First of all, you need to visit the official website of Go to get the latest stable release for your operating system. After downloading, just follow the Go team instructions to install. Usually this will mean running an installer or extracting the downloaded archive somewhere on your system.
Once Go’s installed you’ll want to ensure you setup the necessary environment variables too. You set the Go binary directory on the PATH variable on Unix based systems. In the example of Windows platform, we can set the environment variables as shown below, by displaying the System Properties dialog. Once the Go environment is installed, you can check whether it is installed correctly by opening a Terminal (or Command Prompt) and using the go version command. If Go is correctly installed you should see the installed version of Go on the screen.
Go Syntax and Basic Concepts
Go through the syntax and Produce code from the language over here: Now that you have the languages such as Go works. Go is a procedural, statically typed language in the C domain, with a few key differences. In contrast to C or Java, in Go you do not need to pass semicolons at the end of the line and the code blocks are delimited by curly braces. There are case-sensitive: a hello and Hello two identifier are not same.
Go is package based language, Here every package extends a file. Packages organize code and help make it modular. The first line of a file in Go with package main declaration means is an executable program. Type is one of the basic concepts in Go. Because Go is a statically typed language, all the variables must be declared with their type first before they can be used. In Go, there are several basic types of values such as integers, floating-point numbers, strings, booleans, and others. Structs are also used in Go-type creation with user-defined types as well.
Go Data Types and Variables
Go — VariablesconstantsVariables in Go are declared using the var keyword followed by the variable name and its type. For example, var age int // declares a variable named age of int type. Go also has a feature of type inference, this means you may initialize a variable without a type declaration. In this case, the variable type is taken from the value assigned to it.
Go has a variety of data types built into the language which includes integers, floating-point numbers, strings, booleans, and more. They are data types which allow for the storage and manipulation of a variety of values within your code. Pointers: Go also has pointers, which allow you to alter the memory address of a variable directly. Pointers are used to put addresses of variables into one or other way, and can be used for storage – similar to how you use runtime memory.
Loops and Conditionals in Go — ICONTROL FLOW STATEMENTS
Control flow statements are a central part of any computer language, there are many powerful control flow statements in Go which help you to make decisions and repeat the same action based on some conditions. The if statement is used to execute a block of code if a specified condition is true. It can be followed by an optional else statement, which contains a block of code to be executed if the condition is False. The for Loops Go also has the for loop to execute a block of code a specific number of times or until a condition is met. For is very versatile and can be used to loop over arrays, slices, maps and many other data structures.
Apart from the if statement and the for loop, Go also has other control flow statements like switch and defer. Switch is a conditional statement and is used to design a flow of the program and the Defer is a statement used to delay the call of a function and will be executed at the end of the function (function termination).
Functions and Packages in Go
Functions are further a building block for simply everything in Go. They enable you to wrap a piece of code, which you can run multiple times with different parameters. Functions in Go are declared by the keyword func, followed by the function name, list of parameters and its type, an optional return type and function body. Go support types of function anonymous and named. Function literals or also anonymous functions, can be assigned to variables or passed as arguments to other functions.
Go allows multiple return values from a function, helpful in various use-cases. Listed below is an example function that adds the sum and average of a special list of numbers at once.
In Go… well, Go has packages to organize code into reusable units. The Basics of Go Concurrency → Go by Example Package main A package is a collection of Go source files that are compiled together. Using the import keyword package: import package; Keeping similar packages together promotes code readability.
GoLang Error Handling and Exception Handling
It is one the most fundamental features in any programming language to cover up as error handling and Go offers a simplistic and powerful error handling mechanism. Go ErrorsAs we know errors are a type defined in the errors package and in go errors are represented by the error interface. Go Error handling is explicit and error are not handled as exceptions. Exceptions are not thrown in Golang but error return value is the very last return value of the function. The calling function can then examine the error value and act accordingly.
As stated in a previous point, Go has the defer statement which helps you to make sure that some clean up tasks are executed whether an error happens or not. This is useful for releasing resources, closing files, or unlocking mutexes.
Golang Concurrency and Goroutine Best Practices
Concurrency hasan another cheekwhere, and one crucial feature of Go is its built-in support for concurrency. Concurrency in simple words is executing multiple tasks at the same time and in Go, you can write concurrent code so easily using Goroutines. Goroutines in Golang are lightwight threads that enable a method to run concurrently. They are super lightweight and light on memory thereby allowing you to spawn tens of thousands if not millions of Goroutines without any performance deficit.
All you have to do to create a Goroutine is to preface a function invocation with the Golang keyword. The scheduler built into the Golang runtime spawns Goroutines on the spare threads to being able to perform tasks concurrently. Golang also delivered Goroutines and channels for message base communication and synchronization among Goroutines. Channels are the pipes that connect concurrent goroutinesYou can send values into channels from one goroutine and receive those values in another channel.
Top Go Frameworks and Libraries
However, the Go ecosystem has exploded in recent years and there is an excellent selection of frameworks and libraries for just about anything you can think of. No matter if you are developing a web application, a micro-service or command-line tool, usually there is a Go library or framework that helps you get going. Gin is one of the most popular Golang frameworks and is used for creating a flexible and lightweight HTTP framework for creating web applications using Golang. While Gin has an extensive offering that includes routing, request parsing, etc.
Another widely used by Go developers library is gorm — a versatile ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) library for Golang. With Gorm you can simplify databases processes by providing you a simple interface to perform CRUD operations on your data as well as make API interactions easier with complex data models. Other worthy libraries and frameworks in the Golang environment consist of echo for Restful Apis improvement, cobra for Command-line Programs enhancement and viper for Configurations files management.
Resources and materials to become proficient in Golang
There are plenty of resources if you are interested in becoming Golang master. Based on my own experience, here are a couple of suggestions: For this, the official Golang website has got extensive documentation, tutorials, and guides for getting you started with the language.
The Golang Tour: an interactive online tutorial that…
Plus You can Learn It Through millenniahope (2020) Unlike many other languages, Golang has its concurrency support built right into the core language as goroutines and channels.
The “Effective Go” guide
If you are a beginner and need to see how Golang handles them, the website of “Golang by Example” has a series of code examples that will allow you to understand how Golang works. Despite all the language intricacies, the Golang community is alive and strong, with many blogs, forums and on-line communities where you can ask, share experiences, or connect with other Golang developers.
Conclusion
To sum up, Go (Golang) is a popular programming language which is fast and efficient. It’s arguably just about as simple with performance par with the fastest options and with async built into the language. If you’re an experienced programmer or just starting out with coding in general, Go is a breath of fresh air. Python offers an uncluttered syntax, cleanliness, and gives you a blend of openness, so dealing with python is fun. If you like reading this article then please consider reading our article about Dalgona Candy.
