2016-06-05

Go is Programming Language for The Future

Well, I like Go so much, Here's some reason why Go is the language for the future:

1. low learning curve. syntax similar to C, but it's simplified, high readability, standardized code-formatting, almost no syntax changes from older version to newer version, has compact language specification for whole language (only 79 A4 pages) compared to:
2. it performs near equal to Java
3. fast compile, especially for big project

4. concurrency at language level, it's no doubt that concurrency is the trend (processor manufacturer now tend to adding more cores)

5. garbage collected, safe-pointer, contrast to manual memory management that can lead to buggy code (eg. memory leaks, buffer overflow attacks)

6. built-in utf8 string and maps (associative array), as other newer programming language also done (the Go programming language creator also the one that wrote utf8)

7. big company support (Google), other companies that have been using Go: Dropbox, Twitter, SoundCloud, etc, this leads to future job vacancy.


8. small memory footprint (unlike Java, that everything has 8-12 bytes overhead)

9. built-in package management, it's easy to distribute libraries, leads to many contribution.

10. simple cross compilation

11. autocomplete daemon, this leads to many editor/IDE support

12. built-in testing support (for TDD/BDD)

There's many other things that I personally like from Go:
  • variable initial value always zeroed
  • limited set of operator (no frustration when other people use too many operator with confusing precedence)
  • no generics XD yes, I found C++'s template error message really painful, but templates are quite useful when writing generic data structures
  • letter case visibility
  • no function overloading
  • statically linked
  • no circular dependency
  • no warnings, just errors
I bet Go will become really popular in 2020 (at least until full-featured Swift comes to Linux and Windows). Hopefully there would be Go that compiles to WebAssembly :3