I'm Go Backend developer and love it, Ask Me Anything!

Comments

[Erik Nelson]

How did you get into Go development professionally?

I've been in Java land for ~10 years doing mostly backend work, but I've been seeing increasingly more backend jobs using Go so I'm wondering if this is a direction I should start heading in.

[rhymes]

I don't have enough experience but I think, apart from its concurrency primitives, some of the reasons to consider Go are: it is quite simple to grasp, fast, has a low memory footprint and any app can be deployed as a single file. Its standard library is quite extensive also.

Go through gobyexample.com/ and see if it peaks your interest.

[Dimitrios Filippou]

What are goroutines bro?

[Bregy Malpartida]

Putting "go" word before any function and automatically create a new concurrent task, in my opinion, is awesome. If you want coordinate many tasks you only need think in the flow of your program and implement your own algorithms, but obviously exist a stack library for this work: the fantastic sync library (golang.org/pkg/sync), look at it!

[Rémi Lavedrine]

Goroutines are the Go implementation of concurrency.
And you must not compare Concurrency with Parallelism.

Here is a very good video about it from Rob Pike.

And the associated slides (have a look at it, it is very educational) :
Concurrency is not Parallelism

So it is basically using resources efficiently.
Then you can improve the process using parallelism.

So goroutines are basically the Go implementation of concurrency.

I hope that can help.

[Rémi Lavedrine]

To add something to my previous comment, I can point anyone that is interested in Go concurrency models and so goroutines to the best article I have read about it from Trevor Forrey on Medium.
medium.com/@trevor4e/learning-gos-...

It is the perfect one if you are not very used to it and want to learn it the easy way.
And then have a look at his other article. They are absolutely great materials about Go.

[Javier Garcia]

I found this helpful x)

gobyexample.com/goroutines

[Georgina Grey]

Do you think Golang is a good first programming language? For people that have zero experience in development, but would like to understand core concepts of programming they can later apply to other similar languages.

[Bregy Malpartida]

Oh, wow, hard question, really I don't know I think any language is a good language for understanding core concepts of programming because all concepts are similar (like flow control or computer logic). But I accept exist better languages for the introduction to programming mind, (e.g. python) I suppose it is good because of its simplicity and versatility. Go have very intuitive reserved words and that makes simplicity to Go, but also it has deep concepts that you need to practice to master that. Finally, I'm not sure but I think that exist better languages for start to learn programming core concepts, for me that language is python.

[Bregy Malpartida]

Following godoc of this function, Math.Round rounded any float to the nearest integer, rounding half away from zero (golang.org/pkg/math/#Round) and this function only exist from Go 1.10. If you want another more complex unit to round you can implement it.

func Round(x, unit float64) float64 {
    return math.Round(x/unit) * unit
}

fmt.Println(Round(12.3456, 0.01)) // 12.35 
fmt.Println(Round(0.363636, 0.01)) // 0.35
fmt.Println(Round(1.922636, 0.01)) // 1.92

You can round float and obteing a string without function Round, if you want you can convert your string to float later.

s := fmt.Sprintf("%.2f", 12.3456) // s == "12.35"

Here there good references
yourbasic.org/golang/round-float-2...
yourbasic.org/golang/round-float-t...

[Ravern Koh]

People say that the Erlang (and Elixir) ecosystems are much more suited (and battle-tested) for building large-scale, fault-tolerant systems.

I actually agree with this.

I feel that Go is more suited for things like Docker, where the main requirement is being extremely stable and fast at the same time. For large codebases, it also works really well due to its "stupid" coding style.

[Ben Halpern]

For large codebases, it also works really well due to its "stupid" coding style.

I still haven't found the motivation to get past hello world in Go, but this description appeals to me.

[George]

What sets go aside and makes it unique from other languages? Specifically for backend.
(Excluding that its a functional language)

[Rémi Lavedrine]

Its concurrency implementation makes it very easy to write softwares that are very efficient.
And it is a compiled language which means that it is faster than interpreted language.
So if you have to process a ton of data, Go is definitely interesting.
And it is very easy to learn. ;-)

[Bregy Malpartida]

I agree <3

[Periklis Gkolias]

Go seems applicable in many fields. Do you think it will become mainstream in areas where there is a de-facto leader today, any time soon? Eg banking and enterprise(Java), DevOps and Machine learning(python), system programming(C++ I believe) or game programming(C# maybe, due to unity)

[Ben Halpern]

What other languages were you working with before you got into Go?

[Bregy Malpartida]

I love python too, and I had experience with C and C++, I think Go is an awesome language but its program paradigm (without objects and using pointers) needs special attention and concentration.

[Subramanian 😎]

I've started Learning Go recently. So far, I've written standalone scripts in Go.
How do I go from a beginner to an advanced Go developer?

[Bregy Malpartida]

Really I don't know, probably the experience and the practice is the best options. If you're creating your own standalone scripts I think you only need merge many of these for creating a big application, one pretty idea to make "complex programs" with Go is create a Backend using its "http" stack library.

[Arjun Dahal]

i want to ask you the roadmap of the backend developer what should i do to get started with go lang. i know the basics of go and tour of go is also completed. so what do i read or do now ? what should be my next steps