Go ……go And Learn Go!!

By Author: Dr. R. Lalitha, Professor, CSE, RIT
Total Articles: 4
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Are you confident in Python Programming? Can you create AI applications using Python? Yes…. It’s wonderful and great. Also, be ready to learn the ‘Go’ Programming Language which is chasing Python to win the race!

‘Go’ also called Golang is a general-purpose language developed by Google a decade ago. Though AI application developers and Data scientists are crazy with the features of Python, there are certain issues and challenges in Python that can slow up the process of developing AI applications in the near future.

Few major issues are:

Slow execution
Lack of support to concurrency
The dynamic allocation of data types further reduces the speed in Python
The Go Programming language overcomes these issues. Go is a procedural and open source programming language developed by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson at Google in 2007. It is statically typed and compiled, fast executing language like C++ and Java. Go provides a wide range of powerful tools that helps to develop highly efficient products. Few of them are:

Gofmt – automatically format the Go code

Gorun ...
... – Experiment and test a similar code

Goget – Helps to download libraries from GitHub

Godoc – Parses the source code and create document

The excellent testing capabilities and garbage collection are the added advantages of the Go programming language. The syntax of the language is similar to C and C++ and it is extremely helpful to build cross-platform applications.

Go is in use for different development activities like WebApp, Full Stack Development, Mobile applications, embedded systems, data science. Major companies like Google, IBM, Apple, Facebook, Twitter,BBC, PayPal, American Express are developing products using Go programming language.

Golang has many popular web frameworks like:

Gin – To develop high-performing APIs

Echo – Provides data binding feature with JSON and XML

GoKit – Used to develop applications that provide microservices.

The sophisticated features of Go/Golang is going to make it more popular and highly needed language to develop all applications in mid 20s.