Golang (or Go) is a versatile open-source programming language. Designed at Google with version 1.0 released in 2012, Go has several features that have made it one of the top 5 software development environments in no time at all. Primarily used to build system-level solutions, it is statically typed and produces compiled binaries. Developed to surpass the shortcomings of C++ and Java, its syntax is similar to C, making it is easy to learn, fast and scalable.

As Go is a general-purpose programming language, you can leverage its capabilities to build various solutions. In addition, it comes with a host of features that enhance the software development process, such as automatic documentation and an embedded testing environment. Over and above these development aids, Go also extends the technical capabilities of its predecessors. For example, it has better memory management, garbage collection, and concurrency support.

Building Solutions with Go

Although Go's creators developed the language as a successor to C, they also took various features from other languages that enhance Go's capabilities. For example, its source code readability and reusability are similar to Python. It also provides high performance in networking and multi-server architectures. These features make it an ideal platform for building solutions that range from web development to machine learning.

Web Applications

Golang's inherent capability that offers software developers concurrency and scalability makes it well-suited for web development projects. Compared to dynamically typed languages like Python and PHP, Go also provides far better speed and performance. The Golang community has also developed several web app frameworks such as Beego, Martini, and Revel. These platforms come with several core features that software developers can leverage to deliver projects with increased speed and efficiency.

In addition to the app frameworks, software developers can use Go's inherent capabilities to build web applications. Elements such as HTML, JSON, and HTTP form part of the language's core codebase. As Google created Golang to meet their internal web infrastructure requirements, you can also leverage it to build a web server. The true benefit of adopting this approach is that the app and server run on the same codebase, leading to better integration, scalability, and performance.

Server-Side Development

Go's concurrency, scalability, and performance make it an ideal language for building server-side applications. Its implementation of goroutines breaks the traditional architecture of an Operating System thread needed for every single thread of execution. Instead, the goroutine manages the interaction between the code and the underlying server infrastructure. This approach creates a natural non-blocking I/O model, which is similar to the same technique used by Node.js. However, the difference here is that the Go callback mechanism interacts with the scheduler automatically. This architecture means you can have a non-blocking I/O thread for every OS core, making it faster and a lot more scalable.

In addition to its natural non-blocking I/O features, Go's static typing also makes it an ideal language for server-side development. As you compile the code into executable binaries before deployment, it does not need any runtime interpretation like JavaScript or Python. It is also easier to deploy as the binary includes any code dependencies, so you do not need to configure them in production.

Distributed Services

Services distributed across a network, as one would find in a microservices architecture, need concurrency. Go's capabilities in this regard make it well-suited for building solutions that align with a distributed services approach.

Leveraging goroutines, software developers can build the scalability needed to managed multiple threads simultaneously. This capability, in addition to Go channels, creates the concurrency required by distributed network services. These Go code artifacts provide the communication object that enables the information exchange between goroutines. In addition to managing the contact between goroutines, these objects also provide the synchronization needed for scalable event handling across distributed network solutions.

Cloud-Native Development

Go's concurrency, and its networking capabilities make it the language of cloud infrastructure. If we consider that Google created Go for this very purpose, its features align perfectly with cloud-native app requirements. In addition to its built-in concurrency and networking elements, Go's creators also built it for portability. These three features make it a relevant technology to build applications that run on cloud services.

Golang's portability stems from its cross-platform support. With Go, you only need to write the code once, and you can then deploy it anywhere. This feature also makes maintainability far more practical, as you only need to manage one codebase. If the app requires a change, you only need to modify it in one place and then compile it for the relevant deployment platform, whether it is Windows, Linux, or macOS. You can also deploy it on services that run different CPU architectures as it supports x86, ARM, and other niche technologies such as ppc64 and MIPS.

Machine Learning

Go's versatility as a general-purpose, cross-platform programming language also gives software developers the ability to leverage its capabilities for machine learning. As a statically typed programming language, its binaries provide the speed and performance needed for CPU-intensive, high computation calculations. Its scalability, concurrency, and portability also give data scientists the flexibility necessary to build machine learning solutions at scale.

In addition to its built-in features, there are also several machine learning libraries written in Go. GoLearn, Gorgonia, and goml are just some of the platforms available. Leveraging these solutions, software developers can integrate their code without calling any external libraries written in another programming language. Furthermore, this integration allows for great portability and maintainability as solution architects only need to manage a single Go codebase.

Golang's Versatility

Go's features make it a versatile general-purpose programming language that you can leverage to build a wide range of different applications. Its goroutines, channels, and compiled machine code binaries create the scalability, concurrency, and portability modern software solutions require. Built for speed and born in the cloud, Go is a programming language that developers can leverage to create everything from web applications and microservices to cloud-native apps and machine learning solutions.

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