Go is a statically typed programming language created by Google engineers. It is very similar to C, but has a few key differences, such as memory safety, garbage collection, and CSP concurrency. Go also supports many concurrency features, such as type-safety and C-style syntax.
Simple syntax
The Go language uses tokens to represent words. There are four classes of tokens in Go: spaces, horizontal tabs, carriage returns, and newlines. White space is ignored as a token separator, but can trigger the insertion of a semicolon. Newlines can also be omitted before closing characters.
Methods in Go are declared with their signature and arguments in the int type. Each method can only have one name, and method names must be unique. String literals are also allowed, but can contain line breaks. They are UTF-8-encoded, and the return type is int.
Object-oriented programming
The go language’s object-oriented programming support focuses on the use of interfaces. An interface is a type that declares a set of methods and attributes. An object that implements an interface automatically implements the methods. This approach is known as “information hiding” and it is implemented in Go with packages.
Interfaces are sets of methods which are implemented by any type. This allows an interface to abstract the concrete type values. This represents the dependency inversion principle. The go language uses interfaces to express useful concepts and allows for testability. By using interfaces, you can create a lightweight implementation of an object without having to worry about type hierarchy. You can also create new interfaces without having to redefine the type hierarchy.
While classes and methods are valuable, not everything can be an object. In Go, functions can exist outside of objects. This is a great advantage for small programs.
Support for concurrency
The Go language is a general purpose language that supports concurrency by allowing multiple processes to run in parallel. To achieve this, the language supports message-based communication. Channels are a type of data structure that allows one goroutine to send and receive data from another goroutine. A channel can contain built-in or named types and pointers to structure or reference types.
A large program is composed of many smaller programs, each handling a particular task. For example, a web server handles requests from web browsers and serves HTML web pages in response. The web server handles these requests just like a small program, and it can handle many different requests at once. Concurrency can be useful when a program has to deal with multiple users. It can also help with frequent database operations, which are often handled by multiple threads.
Platform independence
Platform independence is a key concept in Go language design. This principle is important when an application needs to run on multiple platforms. However, platform independence in Go is not always necessary. It is better to make your application orthogonal, which allows you to change platforms easily. In this way, you will be able to maintain the same functionality, without incurring extra costs.
Go was developed about a decade ago, a time when production software was written in C++ and Java. Most computers back then did not even have multiprocessors. In addition, only a few high-level IDEs were available, such as Visual Studio and Eclipse.
Simplified standard library
The Go language’s standardized standard library is a valuable resource for Go developers. Its community packages are well-designed, and provide functionality that traditional standard libraries lack. The Go community uses the library for a variety of tasks, including networking, HTTP, image processing, cryptology, and more.
The Go standard library makes it easy to create small, ad-hoc interfaces that capture relationships and operations during development. This helps developers see the eventual structure of their program as they create it. Go programmers can also define their own one-method interfaces, which are also used in the Go standard library.
Another benefit of Go’s standard library is its ability to support multiple concurrent threads of control. These threads, called goroutines, run in a shared address space. Each goroutine has a stack of a few kilobytes, which is automatically resized when it completes its operation. This makes goroutines an inexpensive primitive that developers can use to structure their programs. For example, a server program may contain thousands of goroutines, each running in its own thread.