Why you should learn Go

Golang is a great language to learn if you want to build high-performance, concurrent applications quickly and easily. Its simplicity, performance, and built-in tools make it an excellent choice for both beginners and experienced developers alike.

Straight to the point

Here are some of the reasons I love Go

1. Simplicity: Golang is a simple, easy-to-learn language. Its syntax is clean and straightforward, making it an excellent language for beginners to start with.
2. Fast performance: Golang was designed to be fast. It compiles quickly, and its runtime performance is comparable to that of C or C++. This makes it an excellent choice for building high-performance applications, such as web servers, networking tools, and data processing applications.
3. Concurrency: Golang was built from the ground up to support concurrency, making it easy to write programs that can perform multiple tasks simultaneously. This is especially useful for building scalable applications that can handle many requests at once.
4. Built-in tools: Golang comes with a robust standard library that includes many useful tools and packages. For example, the “net/http” package makes it easy to build HTTP servers and clients, and the “encoding/json” package makes it easy to work with JSON data.
5. Growing popularity: Golang has been steadily gaining popularity over the past few years. It is now widely used in many industries, including tech, finance, and healthcare. This means that learning Golang can open up many job opportunities.

Go Routines

What the hell are they and why are they useful

A goroutine is a lightweight thread of execution that allows concurrent code to be executed in a simple and efficient way. Goroutines are similar to threads in other programming languages, but they are more lightweight and have a smaller memory footprint.

To create a goroutine, you simply add the keyword “go” in front of a function call. For example:

func main() {
    go sayHello()
}

func sayHello() {
    fmt.Println("Hello, World!")
}

In this example, the sayHello() function is executed as a goroutine. When the sayHello() function is called, a new goroutine is created, and the function is executed concurrently with the main program. This means that the "Hello, World!" message is printed out independently of any other code that may be executing in the main program.

Goroutines are managed by the Go runtime, which schedules them on a set of threads that are created when the program starts. The Go runtime uses a technique called “multiplexing” to allow many goroutines to execute on a smaller number of threads. This means that goroutines can be created and destroyed quickly and efficiently, without the overhead of creating a full-blown thread for each one.

Goroutines are a powerful feature of Golang that make it easy to write concurrent code. By using goroutines, you can write code that performs multiple tasks simultaneously without having to worry about the details of thread management.

So you’re still reading?

If you’ve gotten to this point you’re still interested in Go, and who could blame you, I love this language. Here’s some of the best resources / steps to follow.

1. Install Golang: The first step to learning Golang is to download and install it. You can download the latest version of Go from the official website: https://golang.org/dl/
2. Learn the basics: Once you have installed Golang, you can start learning the basics. You can start with the official Go Tour: https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1. This interactive tutorial covers the basics of the language and gives you a chance to practice what you have learned.
3. Read the documentation: The official Go documentation is an excellent resource for learning the language. You can find it here: https://golang.org/doc/
4. Practice writing code: The best way to learn any programming language is to write code. Start with small programs, such as printing “Hello, World!” to the console, and gradually move on to more complex programs.
5. Use online resources: There are many online resources available for learning Golang. Some of the most popular ones include:

• The Go Programming Language book: https://www.gopl.io/
• A Tour of Go: https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1
• The Go Wiki: https://github.com/golang/go/wiki
• The Go Forum: https://forum.golangbridge.org/

Join the community

Golang has a large and active community of developers. You can join online forums, chat rooms, and social media groups to ask questions, get feedback, and connect with other developers.

I hope this helped you out and happy coding, just don’t end up like this guy: