Transitioning to Golang has been a top priority for a lot of our clients lately and it’s easy to see why; According to Stack Overflow's recent survey, 67% of survey respondents enjoy writing code in Go, and 18% want to try working with it. To add to that, Go programmers are earning a pretty penny too, having the third highest median salaries in 2020 after Perl and Scala programmers.

 We spoke to a number of our candidates and clients to find out the benefits of learning Golang. Here’s what they had to say:

It’s easy to learn.

Golang’s syntax is easy to learn and is small compared to other languages. You can keep most of it in your head so you’re not constantly researching or looking things up. It’s also easy to read; a lot of engineers used to C-style syntax can pick up Golang and understand what they’re reading out of the gate.

There are Opensource libraries from the community.

There’s an increasing list of libraries, software, and frameworks available that become your go to tool when picking up Golang. Sites like Awesome Go are a great example of this.

Golang has a powerful standard library.

Golang has a nice standard library. It provides handy built-in functions for working with primitive types. There are packages that make it easy to stand up a web server, handle I/O, work with cryptography, and manipulate raw bytes.

It’s super speedy

It’s a fast language compiled to machine code. Golang will naturally outperform languages that are interpreted or have virtual runtimes. Golang programs also compile extremely fast, and the resulting single binary is very small.

Garbage Collection

Memory management in Golang was intentionally made easier than in C and C++. This makes using pointers much safer because it doesn’t allow pointer arithmetic and gives you the option of using value types.

What are your thoughts on Golang? Is it something you would like to pick up? We have many clients looking to hire experienced software engineers who are thinking about learning Golang. Contact us or visit our jobs board if you would like to find out more.