GO ……go and learn GO!!

Are you confident in Python Programming? Can you create AI applications using Python? Yes…. It’s wonderful and great. Also, be ready to learn the ‘Go’ Programming Language which is chasing Python to win the race!

• Go’ also called Golang is a general-purpose language developed by Google a decade ago. Though AI application developers and Data scientists are crazy with the features of Python, there are certain issues and challenges in Python that can slow up the process of developing AI applications in the near future.

Few major issues are:

• Slow execution
• Lack of support to concurrency
• The dynamic allocation of data types further reduces the speed in Python

The Go Programming language overcomes these issues. Go is a procedural and open source programming language developed by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson at Google in 2007. It is statically typed and compiled, fast executing language like C++ and Java. Go provides a wide range of powerful tools that helps to develop highly efficient products. Few of them are:

Gofmt – automatically format the Go code

Gorun – Experiment and test a similar code

Goget – Helps to download libraries from GitHub

Godoc – Parses the source code and create document

The excellent testing capabilities and garbage collection are the added advantages of the Go programming language. The syntax of the language is similar to C and C++ and it is extremely helpful to build cross-platform applications.

Go is in use for different development activities like WebApp, Full Stack Development, Mobile applications, embedded systems, data science. Major companies like Google, IBM, Apple, Facebook, Twitter,BBC, PayPal, American Express are developing products using Go programming language.

Golang has many popular web frameworks like:

Gin – To develop high-performing APIs

Echo – Provides data binding feature with JSON and XML

GoKit – Used to develop applications that provide microservices.

The sophisticated features of Go/Golang is going to make it more popular and highly needed language to develop all applications in mid 20s.

Performance(Machine code)

GoLang is a compilation language which can be compiled to machine code and the compiled binary can be directly deployed to target machine without extra dependency. The performance is better than those interpreted languages.

Dynamic language feel

GoLang is a static language but it gives a feeling of dynamic language to developers. As a static language, lots of hidden issues can be detected when doing the compilation, especially syntax errors. Also there are lots of packages available for developer to use and it's very easy to import them during development, this makes us less worried about its capability and makes us feel like we are dealing with a dynamic language.

Concurrency support

This is probably the most praised feature of GoLang. It supports concurrency since it's born. It can fully utilize multi core capability. GoLang uses goroutine to achieve concurrency and it provides a very elegant goroutine scheduler system which makes it easy to spawn millions of goroutines. The stack usage can dynamically expand/shrink as well which makes the memory usage more smart. This is different from Java thread which normally allows only thousands of threads to be created. For more comparison, please check out Russell Cohen's article

Read More : https://ritchennai.org/blog/2020/11/30/go-go-and-learn-go/

Author: Dr. L. Maria Michael Visuwasam Assistant Professor, Cse Rajalakshmi Institute of Technology, Chennai