What is GoLang

Introduction 

  • This would be a series of articles, in this article, we would talk about GraphQL, its history, benefits, and sample code.

It will cover the following things: 

  • What is GoLang? 
  • History
  • Features 
  • Sample Code

What is GoLang? 

  • Go (also known as Golang) is a programming language developed at Google in 2007. It is a statically-typed language with syntax loosely derived from C, but with additional features such as garbage collection, type safety, and concurrency support.
  • Go is designed to be a simple, fast, and reliable language for systems programming. It has a strong emphasis on simplicity, readability, and maintainability, and its standard library provides support for a wide range of tasks such as networking, web development, and data processing.
  • Go is widely used in the industry for building web servers, command-line tools, and distributed systems, and it is also popular for writing serverless functions and microservices. It has a growing community of users and developers, and it is known for its fast compilation times and efficient execution.

History of GoLang

  • In 2007, a team of engineers at Google set out to create a new programming language that would address some of the challenges and limitations of existing languages. The result was Go, a fast, simple, and efficient language that has quickly gained popularity and adoption in the tech industry.
  • One of the key goals of Go was to provide a systems programming language that was easy to learn, read, and maintain. To achieve this, the designers of Go made a number of decisions that set it apart from other languages:

Features of GoLang

  • Go is statically typed, which means that variables and expressions have a fixed type that is checked at compile-time. This makes it easier to catch errors early on, and it also enables the compiler to generate more efficient code.
  • Go is garbage-collected, which means that it automatically manages the memory used by your programs. This frees you from having to manually allocate and deallocate memory, which can be error-prone and time-consuming.
  • Go has built-in support for concurrency, which allows you to write programs that can perform multiple tasks concurrently. Go uses a model called "goroutines," which are lightweight threads of execution that can be scheduled across multiple CPU cores. Goroutines are easy to use and can greatly improve the performance and scalability of your programs.
  • Go has a simple and expressive syntax that is easy to read and write. It is inspired by the C family of languages, but it is designed to be more concise and expressive, with fewer parentheses and keywords.
  • Go has a powerful standard library that provides support for a wide range of tasks, including networking, web development, and data processing.
  • Go has excellent support for testing and debugging, with tools such as the "go test" command and the "pprof" profiler.

Sample Code

Here is a simple Go program that prints "Hello, World!" to the console:

package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Println("Hello, World!")
​​​​​​​}

This program is made up of three parts:

  1. The package main line specifies that this is the main package, which means that it can be compiled and run as an executable program.
  2. The import "fmt" line brings in the fmt package, which provides functions for formatting and printing output.
  3. The func main() block defines the entry point for the program. It contains a single call to fmt.Println, which prints the string "Hello, World!" to the console.

To run this program, you can use the Go command-line tool:

  1. Save the program to a file named "hello.go".
  2. Open a terminal and navigate to the directory where you saved the file.
  3. Run the command go run hello.go.

This will compile and run the program, and you should see the output "Hello, World!" printed on the console.

In this article, we talked about GoLang, its history, benefits, and sample code, see you in the next series of articles. 

Happy learning! 


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