Why you should use Google Go (2023)
19th December 2024
Google Go has become the go to app development language for startups, SMEs & enterprises in 2023.
In this article we take a look at why you should use Google Go to build your app.
We will cover:
- Why was Google Go created?
- What are the benefits of Google Go?
- Drawbacks of Google Go
- What is Google Go used for?
- How to build apps in Google Go
If you’re not sure what a backend is, take a look at our article & video tutorial, what is backend app development?
Why was Google Go created?
For those of you who don’t know, Google Go or Golang is a programming language created in 2007 by three Google employees: Rob Pike, Robert Griesemer and Ken Thompson.
As Rob Pike, one of the authors of Google Go wrote in an article.
The goals of the Go project were to eliminate the slowness and clumsiness of software development at Google, and thereby to make the process more productive and scalable. The language was designed by and for people who write—and read and debug and maintain—large software systems.
Rob Pike – Author of Google Go
At the time Google engineers were working with backend codebases written mostly in C++, Python & Java, the creators of Google Go wanted to build a new language to help solve challenges that they had while working with the code at Google, whilst also maintaining its effectiveness.
As Rob Pike also wrote:
In short, development at Google is big, can be slow, and is often clumsy. But it is effective.
Rob Pike – Author of Google Go
What the engineers wanted was to take the best of the programming languages C++, C, Python and Java & combine all of these languages together into one easy to write, highly performant and maintainable language. So they developed a way to take the speed of C++ (the fastest programming language), the strict syntax of C, pair this with Python simplicity and all of the useful features of Java and what came out is the new language Google Go.
What are the benefits of Google Go?
Now – as I am aware, our audience is both developers & non-developers, so not all of these benefits will appear obvious to everyone, however we will be writing follow up articles to explain in more detail what these benefits actually mean. But for now, here is a list of the benefits of Google Go.
Some of the key benefits to stress are that Google Go has incredible concurrency support. This means that your application will be faster, cleaner & will give a better experience to your users. This is probably the main reason why people pick Google Go as a programming language for their backend over other programming languages.
At Dittofi we chose to use Google Go both for our own app development, but also to generate the backend of our apps in Google Go because it is the perfect trade off between power & speed to learn. Each Google Go codebase is structured in really similar ways. This makes maintaining a Google Go codebase much easier than on other technologies.
Drawbacks of Google Go
All programming languages have challenges & this wouldn’t be a very balanced article if we didn’t take a look at some of the drawbacks of Google Go. So here again, there is a list of drawbacks of Google Go.
The one main point I would like to draw on here is how verbose Google Go can be. This can lead to lots of extra code being written that other programming languages don’t require. This makes writing Google Go slightly more time consuming & can be bad for teams pushing for deadlines. The average Google Go developer for example will generate around 400 lines of code per day.
A typical MVP app will be around 20,000 lines of Google Go code. So you should expect to take between 2 – 3 months to build an MVP when using Google Go.
That being said, in my opinion a good developer will always tell you that writing the code is not the hard bit. It’s the planning of how best to write the code that takes time. Furthermore, tools like Dittofi’s hybrid no-code platform can help your development team generate more than 7000 lines of perfectly structured Google Go code per day. This will dramatically speed up your app development & improve the quality of your app development.
What is Google Go used for?
According to the latest Google Go developer survey, Google Go is used in a variety of different fields ranging from technology companies, financial services, healthcare, education, transportation to name a few.
Furthermore, of those people who write Google Go code, almost all of them use it in app development for the creation of backend services. So if you’re considering using Google Go as a programming language for your backend app development, there are a lot of use cases for it.
If you look at the Google Go homepage, you can see a list of many technology companies that are using Google Go today. These include names such as Google (obviously), Paypal, Meta, Uber, Twitch – just to name a few.
So clearly Google Go is doing something right, with many technology companies adopting the language and putting their trust in the language for the future.
Furthermore, according to hire, Google Go is the most in demand programming skill in 2023, which further adds to the evidence that more and more businesses are building their apps in Google Go.
How to build apps in Google Go?
Whilst a Google Go developer might cost you $80k a year to hire on a full time basis, with Dittofi you’re able to generate your own custom Google Go code, without having to actually know how to code Google Go at all.
Dittofi enables you to build your entire backend in an entirely visual way. We then translate this into clean, highly valuable and developer friendly Google Go code that you can immediately access and own. This means you can save literally hundreds of thousands of dollars building world class & enterprise grade apps without the burden of actually having to learn Google Go or how to write the code.
The best path forward to rapidly develop your backend in Google Go, using Dittofi, is to join one of our Dittofi Boot Camps program, where you will work with one of our engineers to learn Dittofi & also to implement your app.
Are you a developer?
If you’re a developer, check out a sample of Go code generated in Dittofi.
So – in our opinion – if you’re looking for a technology to develop your backend on that is fast, scalable & maintainable Google Go is a great option & Dittofi enables you to do this without having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring Google Go developers.