Every once in a while, a programming language comes along that completely revolutionizes the industry. For instance, at the turn of the century, Java was primarily used to develop mobile applications, websites, and desktop applications. Then JavaScript came onto the scene and transformed everything.

Yet again, the development world is at this point where experts feel that Go (also called Golang) is potentially the best modern-day language. And this argument has some weightage to it, with Go being a flexible and general-purpose language suitable for a large variety of uses, with about 2.7 million professional developers adept at its know-how. That being so, this guide looks at some of the best use cases for Go.

Why Is Golang Getting So Popular?

Go is becoming increasingly popular because it can be used in almost any scenario. It is a high-performance language used to develop web apps, mobile apps, and microservices and support IoT devices.

Benefits of Golang

In essence, Go is a general-purpose programming language that makes building simple, reliable, and efficient software easy.

Here are glimpses of some of the main benefits of Go:

• It’s fast: Go compiles quickly, runs fast, and offers predictable performance across platforms.
• It’s perfect for modern development: As mentioned above, it’s a general-purpose language that can be used to build anything from microservices to cloud applications.
• It’s open source: Go is free to use, even commercially. Anyone can contribute to the language’s development and use it without paying the license fees.
• It facilitates concurrency: Go has built-in support for concurrency, which means you can write programs that can run on multiple processors without having to rewrite the entire program from scratch every time.

7 Golang Use Cases

Designed at Google in 2009, Golang has a lot of use cases across many fields. Some of the best uses for Go are as follows:

1. Web Applications

Web applications are a widespread use case for Go. The language was designed to be used with web services in mind. One of the main benefits of using Go is that it’s highly scalable, making it an ideal language for any web application.

2. Microservices

With Go, developers can build microservices that are easy to deploy, fast to start up, and efficient to run. To develop a microservice with Golang, they must write their code in an independent package. The package can be compiled into its own binary form, which can be executed independently using the command go run or build.

3. Cloud and Network Programming

Designed for cloud-based systems, Go is perfect for networked applications like web servers or databases. It has built-in concurrency, which makes scaling incredibly easy — making it ideal for modern cloud architectures where you want your application to scale automatically as more users join the site or as more data is stored in the database cluster.

4. Command-line Interfaces (CLIs)

CLIs are everywhere. If you’ve ever used GitHub, GitLab, or another version control system, you’ve used a CLI. A CLI is built around offering up a set of commands that can be executed at one’s discretion. They’re often designed with simplicity in mind and are easy to use for both experienced and inexperienced users alike.

5. Testing

As a programming language, Go is ideal for testing. Right from the start, it has been designed to be clean, readable, and maintainable. The syntax is simple and not too lengthy, making it easier to write the tests quickly without spending much time on formatting or thinking of a way to make the code look good.

6. System Utilities

System utilities are one of the most common use cases for Go. The reason is that they need to be efficient and reliable, so they must be compiled into binary rather than interpreted at runtime. They also need to run on multiple platforms — unlike the other languages we mentioned earlier — so they don’t have a huge ecosystem of libraries written in other languages.

7. Network Servers and Performance-critical Programs Requiring Concurrency

Go is great for building high-performance network servers or any other program requiring concurrency. Its excellent support for networking makes it a natural fit for the fast-paced world of networking protocols, which are often implemented in C++ or Rust due to their low-level performance requirements.

8. Utilities and Standalone Tools

The language is used to build utilities that do one thing – like convert images from one format to another or create a database of information about users. Go can also be used to create standalone tools that are not part of a larger application and are not intended to be distributed with the rest of an application’s code.

Conclusion

Go’s simplicity and excellent performance in areas where C and Java fall short will put it on many developers’ radars. The simple syntax makes it a natural choice for beginners who are wary of dealing with verbose languages.

Go’s lack of dependencies also makes it attractive, as developers don’t have to deal with the issues that come up with external libraries and packages. To learn more about Go, connect with our experts at Sagacity.