Go has goroutines !!As we discussed above, hardware manufacturers are adding more and more cores to the processors to increase the performance. All the data centers are running on those processors and we should expect increase in the number of cores in upcoming years. More to that, today’s applications using multiple micro-services for maintaining database connections, message queues and maintain caches. So, the software we develop and the programming languages should support concurrency easily and they should be scalable with increased number of cores.But, most of the modern programming languages(like Java, Python etc.) are from the ’90s single threaded environment. Most of those programming languages supports multi-threading. But the real problem comes with concurrent execution, threading-locking, race conditions and deadlocks. Those things make it hard to create a multi-threading application on those languages.For an example, creating new thread in Java is not memory efficient. As every thread consumes approx 1MB of the memory heap size and eventually if you start spinning thousands of threads, they will put tremendous pressure on the heap and will cause shut down due to out of memory. Also, if you want to communicate between two or more threads, it’s very difficult.On the other hand, Go was released in 2009 when multi-core processors were already available. That’s why Go is built with keeping concurrency in mind. Go has goroutines instead of threads. They consume almost 2KB memory from the heap. So, you can spin millions of goroutines at any time.
Other benefits are :Goroutines have growable segmented stacks. That means they will use more memory only when needed.Goroutines have a faster startup time than threads.Goroutines come with built-in primitives to communicate safely between themselves (channels).Goroutines allow you to avoid having to resort to mutex locking when sharing data structures.Also, goroutines and OS threads do not have 1:1 mapping. A single goroutine can run on multiple threads. Goroutines are multiplexed into small number of OS threads.
Go runs directly on underlying hardware.One most considerable benefit of using C, C++ over other modern higher level languages like Java/Python is their performance. Because C/C++ are compiled and not interpreted.Processors understand binaries. Generally, when you build an application using Java or other JVM-based languages when you compile your project, it compiles the human readable code to byte-code which can be understood by JVM or other virtual machines that run on top of underlying OS. While execution, VM interprets those bytecodes and convert them to the binaries that processors can understand.
While on the other side, C/C++ does not execute on VMs and that removes one step from the execution cycle and increases the performance. It directly compiles the human readable code to binaries.
But, freeing and allocating variable in those languages is a huge pain. While most of the programming languages handle object allocation and removing using Garbage Collector or Reference Counting algorithms.Go brings best of both the worlds. Like lower level languages like C/C++, Go is compiled language. That means performance is almost nearer to lower level languages. It also uses garbage collection to allocation and removal of the object. So, no more malloc() and free() statements!!! Cool!!!
Code written in Go is easy to maintain.Let me tell you one thing. Go does not have crazy programming syntax like other languages have. It has very neat and clean syntax.The designers of the Go at google had this thing in mind when they were creating the language. As google has the very large code-base and thousands of developers were working on that same code-base, code should be simple to understand for other developers and one segment of code should has minimum side effect on another segment of the code. That will make code easily maintainable and easy to modify.Go intentionally leaves out many features of modern OOP languages.No classes. Every thing is divided into packages only. Go has only structs instead of classes.Does not support inheritance. That will make code easy to modify. In other languages like Java/Python, if the class ABC inherits class XYZ and you make some changes in class XYZ, then that may produce some side effects in other classes that inherit XYZ. By removing inheritance, Go makes it easy to understand the code also (as there is no super class to look at while looking at a piece of code).No constructors.No annotations.No generics.No exceptions.Above changes make Go very different from other languages and it makes programming in Go different from others. You may not like some points from above. But, it is not like you can not code your application without above features. All you have to do is write 2–3 more lines. But on the positive side, it will make your code cleaner and add more clarity to your code.
Above graph displays that Go is almost as efficient as C/C++, while keeping the code syntax simple as Ruby, Python and other languages. That is a win-win situation for both humans and processors!!!Unlike other new languages like Swift, it’s syntax of Go is very stable. It remained same since the initial public release 1.0, back in year 2012. That makes it backward compatible.
