Intro to Go

Basic facts about Go

• is a statically typed, garbage collected, compiled programming language
• developed by Google (Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Robert Griesemer)
• 1.0 released in March 2012
  • guarantees compatibility
• Stack Overflow (most wanted): 3 (2020)

Famous software in Go:

• Docker, Kubernetes (OpenShift, IKS, etc.)
• InfluxDB, TiDB, CockroachDB
• Mattermost, Terraform, Hugo

Go Developer Survey 2020

Excerpt from the Go Developer Survey: https://go.dev/blog/survey2020-results

• Go usage is expanding in the workplace and enterprise with 76% of respondents using Go at work and 66% saying Go is critical to their company’s success.
• Overall satisfaction is high with 92% of respondents being satisfied using Go.
• Respondents reported upgrading promptly to the latest Go version, with 76% in the first 5 months.
• Go continues to be heavily used for APIs, CLIs, Web, DevOps & Data Processing.

Hello World

package main

import "fmt"

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

Hello Microservice-World

package main

import "net/http"

func main() {
    http.HandleFunc("/", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
        _, _ = w.Write([]byte("Hello World"))
    })
    http.ListenAndServe(":80", nil)
}

Why should Go interest me?

Why was Go developed? (1/2)

• Moore's law is ending

• Demand for performant software is increasing

Why was Go developed? (2/2)

Let's take a look at Google:

• huge network loads
• one mono-repository
• a few supported languages: (C/C++, Java, Python, JavaScript)

What they needed:

• statically typed and run-time efficient as C
• readability and usability as Python and JavaScript
• high-performance networking and multiprocessing

History

• started 2007
• publicly announced 2009
• 1.0 released in March 2011

Important Steps in development (over the last 10 years):

• Code Coverage support in go test
• Module support: integrated support for versioning and package distribution

Next big thing:

• Generics in Go (RFC approved few days ago)

Features

• integrated test framework
• great standard library
  • Networking (TCP,UDP,HTTP,SMTP)
  • Database (SQL)
  • Time, Image, Encoding, Crypto, Compression, etc.
• supports open source development
  • huge ecosystem of libraries

Use cases

Frontend vs. Backend

• Go is almost never run by end-users
• Go is used for web backends, infrastructure (i.e. Kubernetes)
• Go is a great choice for developer tools
• Go is also useful as a scripting language

Scripting and Tools

• Code can be run as a script: go run file.go
• Binaries bundle all dependencies
• Binaries are nearly static by default
• Startup time is short

Cross-Compilation

• Go compiler needs a single flag to build for other platforms
  • GOOS=darwin go build file.go builds binaries for Mac, without requiring a Mac
• Other architectures are also possible
  • GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm go build file.go builds an ARM binary
• A single CI process can build a binary for all platforms and architectures
• Resulting binary is very portable
  • On Linux, binary will only depend on glibc

Thank you