I have been, and continue to be, a fan of the Python programming language. It’s clean looking, portable, quick to write, has tons of libraries and a great community. However, I, like many other software developers, don’t think that one must be married to a language. Go has received a lot of attention as of late and it finally makes sense to me as to why.

I’ve gone through, and added to my tool belt, many languages before Python becoming my go to star. The first was Perl. Being so versatile and having a large community of both professional and hobby developers made it an easy early choice for me. The biggest issue for me with Perl was I started to learn how much I liked simple, easy to read code which follows a coding standard. PHP became my fall back web language. It was so simple to write an application it was almost dumb not to use it at the time. No language is perfect and I found many developers at the time didn’t know how to write safe PHP or easy to follow code. I slowly drifted away from PHP as a mainstay. C, while fast and being, well, C, never became a go to mainly because of the time to get things done.

Java just never really did it for me. University tried to shove it down my throat and it didn’t work. Funny thing is I really tried to like it. I gave it multiple chances but would always walk away feeling better with my hands untied from the JVM. I also found myself loathing IDE’s due to people’s insistence that a Java developer needs to use one to be productive. Like many cool kids I became a Java hater for a while and did everything I could to keep friends away from it. But enough of this, let’s talk about Go.

Go has been on my radar since its initial announcement. If I remember right my first thoughts were not positive ones. Everyone and their brother seemed to have their own languages coming out or, at the very least, a DSL which would be the next big thing. I decided to stay back for a bit and see what would happen with the language rather than diving in or slamming the door. Since then there has been a good amount of libraries created for the language, some pretty interesting users such as Docker and DropBox and this post which sums up why Go is a good option when considering Node.js.

What I’ve found is that no tutorial, video nor explanation from a Go fan could convince me to actually see why Go could be so great. After all, the idea behind Go’s OO support sounds half hearted. So one night I did a Google search for what features make people fawn over Go and channels and goroutines came up quite a lot. The next step was to write a Hello World like application that would utilize both features and see how I felt. This is what I came up with:

package main

import "fmt"


// Coms turns into a communication instance. in/out are channels.
type Coms struct {
    in    chan string
    out   chan string
}

// Closes both in and out channels in a Coms instance.
func (c Coms) Close() error {
    fmt.Println("Closing channels")
    close(c.in)
    close(c.out)
    return nil
}
// -------------------


// Main function which sends ping and pong back in two goroutines
// using a Coms instance.
func main() {
    // Creating an "object"
    coms := Coms{make(chan string), make(chan string)}
    // At the end of the function run coms.Close.
    defer coms.Close()

    // First goroutine which ping's out and responds
    // back to pong's with a ping.
    go func() {
        coms.in <- "ping"
        for {
            data := <- coms.out
            fmt.Println(data)
            coms.in <- "ping"
        }
    }()

    // Second goroutine which pong's in response to ping's.
    go func() {
        for {
            data := <- coms.in
            fmt.Println(data)
            coms.out <- "pong"
        }
    }()

    // To exit the application hit enter
    var input string
    fmt.Scanln(&input)
}

 

The result of this code was:

$ go run pingpong.go
ping
pong
ping
pong
ping
....
⏎
Closing channels
$

 

It’s a simple program but it pulled me in. The OO style was not nearly as clunky as I thought it would be and the goroutines were so simple to use I was almost shocked. I also got first hand feel for a non-intrusive strongly typed system. It felt almost like a dynamic language. For things that need speed I felt hooked!

Will I continue to use Python? Most surely! But for things that need to be super fast I think Go will be my default. If someone told me to greenfield a SaaS service tier I’d probably lobby for using Go while keeping the web tier Python or something(s) similar. uWSGI server anyone?.

If you are still on the fence with go take a quick look at it’s feature set and take the 20 minutes to write a simple application utilizing them. Examples are nice but there is nothing better than trying the syntax and structures yourself. Writing some code should tell you if Go is for you.