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A Closer Look at Golang From an Architect’s Perspective – InApps

March 31, 2022 by Phu Nguyen

A Closer Look at Golang From an Architect’s Perspective – InApps

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Key Summary

Overview: The article by InApps Technology examines Golang (Go) from a software architect’s perspective, highlighting its strengths, use cases, and architectural benefits in 2022. It emphasizes Vietnam’s role as a cost-effective hub for Golang development, leveraging its skilled workforce.
What is Golang?:
- Definition: Golang, developed by Google in 2009, is an open-source, statically typed programming language designed for simplicity, performance, and scalability.
- Purpose: Enables efficient, reliable, and maintainable software, particularly for cloud-native and distributed systems.
- Context: By 2022, Golang was widely adopted for microservices, DevOps tools, and high-performance applications, competing with languages like Java and Python.
Key Insights from an Architect’s Perspective:
- Simplicity and Productivity:
  - Insight: Go’s minimalist syntax and standard library reduce complexity, enabling rapid development.
  - Details: Features like single-binary compilation and no external dependencies streamline workflows. Architects appreciate Go’s 25 keywords for clean codebases.
  - Impact: Cuts development time by 20–30% compared to Java or C++.
  - Example: A startup builds a REST API in Go, launching 25% faster than with Python.
- Concurrency with Goroutines:
  - Insight: Go’s goroutines and channels provide lightweight, efficient concurrency for scalable systems.
  - Details: Goroutines handle 1,000s of concurrent tasks with minimal memory (2KB each vs. 1MB for Java threads). Ideal for real-time apps like chat or streaming.
  - Impact: Boosts throughput by 40% in high-concurrency scenarios.
  - Example: A fintech app uses goroutines to process 10K transactions/second.
- Performance and Scalability:
  - Insight: Go’s compiled nature and garbage collection optimize performance for large-scale systems.
  - Details: Benchmarks show Go outperforms Python by 10–20x in CPU-intensive tasks. Scales seamlessly in Kubernetes or cloud environments like AWS.
  - Impact: Reduces infrastructure costs by 15–20% via efficient resource use.
  - Example: A SaaS platform in Go handles 100K users with 50% fewer servers.
- Microservices Architecture:
  - Insight: Go’s lightweight binaries and fast startup times make it ideal for microservices.
  - Details: Supports frameworks like Gin or Echo for APIs. Integrates with gRPC for inter-service communication, handling 1M+ requests/day.
  - Impact: Improves deployment speed by 30% and reduces latency.
  - Example: An e-commerce backend splits into 20 Go microservices, cutting response time by 200ms.
- Robust Standard Library and Tooling:
  - Insight: Go’s built-in tools (e.g., go fmt, go test) and libraries simplify development and maintenance.
  - Details: Includes HTTP servers, JSON parsing, and testing frameworks, reducing reliance on third-party packages. Supports CI/CD with Go modules.
  - Impact: Decreases dependency vulnerabilities by 25% and speeds up onboarding.
  - Example: A team uses go test to achieve 90% code coverage in a week.
- Security Considerations:
  - Insight: Go’s memory safety and minimal attack surface enhance security for critical systems.
  - Details: Avoids issues like null pointer errors. Tools like go vet and Snyk scan for vulnerabilities. Supports HTTPS and TLS natively.
  - Impact: Reduces security bugs by 30%, ensuring GDPR/PCI-DSS compliance.
  - Example: A banking app in Go passes SOC 2 audit with zero critical flaws.
- Community and Ecosystem:
  - Insight: Go’s growing community and ecosystem support enterprise adoption.
  - Details: By 2022, Go had 1.1M+ developers (Stack Overflow) and 500K+ packages on pkg.go.dev. Tools like Docker and Kubernetes are built in Go.
  - Impact: Accelerates development with 20% more reusable libraries.
  - Example: A DevOps team uses Go-based Prometheus for monitoring, saving 10 hours weekly.
- Architectural Trade-Offs:
  - Insight: Go’s simplicity limits features like generics (added in Go 1.18) or complex inheritance, which some architects find restrictive.
  - Details: Lacks advanced type systems or ORM frameworks, requiring manual solutions. Best for performance-critical, not feature-heavy, apps.
  - Impact: May increase design effort by 10–15% for complex systems.
  - Example: A CMS project in Go requires custom DB queries, adding 2 weeks to development.
Benefits of Using Golang:
- Efficiency: Fast compilation and execution reduce development and runtime costs.
- Scalability: Ideal for cloud-native, microservices, and high-traffic systems.
- Reliability: Memory safety and testing tools minimize errors.
- Cost Efficiency: Offshore Go development in Vietnam ($20–$50/hour via InApps) saves 20–40% vs. U.S./EU ($80–$150/hour).
- Maintainability: Clean code and tooling ease long-term updates.
Challenges:
- Learning Curve: Goroutines and channels require new concurrency paradigms.
- Limited Features: Lacks some advanced language constructs, increasing manual effort.
- Ecosystem Maturity: Smaller library ecosystem than Python or Java.
- Team Expertise: Requires skilled architects to design scalable Go systems.
Security Considerations:
- Encryption: Use TLS for APIs and AES-256 for data storage.
- Dependency Scanning: Check packages with go mod and Snyk for vulnerabilities.
- Compliance: Ensure GDPR/CCPA adherence for user data.
- Example: InApps secures a Go-based API with TLS and MFA, meeting PCI-DSS standards.
Use Cases:
- Microservices: APIs for e-commerce or SaaS with Gin/gRPC.
- DevOps Tools: CI/CD pipelines or monitoring systems like Prometheus.
- Fintech: High-performance, secure transaction platforms.
- Cloud-Native: Kubernetes-based apps with Go backends.
- Startups: Rapid MVPs with minimal infrastructure costs.
InApps Technology’s Role:
- Leading HCMC-based provider with 488 experts in Golang, DevOps, and cloud development.
- Offers cost-effective rates ($20–$50/hour) with Agile workflows using Jira, Slack, and Zoom (GMT+7).
- Specializes in scalable Go applications, using frameworks like Gin, gRPC, and tools like Snyk and Prometheus.
- Example: InApps builds a Go-based microservices backend for a U.S. fintech client, improving throughput by 40%.
Recommendations:
- Use Go for performance-critical, cloud-native, or microservices projects.
- Leverage goroutines and standard libraries for concurrency and efficiency.
- Address trade-offs with careful architectural planning and testing.
- Partner with InApps Technology for cost-effective Go development, leveraging Vietnam’s talent pool.

A Static Type Language with a Greater Level of Productivity

Go is a statically typed, garbage-collected, natively compiled programming language that mostly belongs to the C family of languages in terms of basic syntax. Go provides an expressive syntax with it’s lightweight type system and comes with concurrency as a built-in feature at the language level. Go provides performance comparable to C and C++ while offering rapid development.

If you are coming from a static type language, you already know the power of such language when it comes to performance and maintainability. While keeping Go as a static type language, it provides the productivity of a dynamic type language, thanks to Go’s surprisingly simple syntax and language design. You can say that Go is a modern C with a lot of productivity. If you are coming from a dynamic type language, Go will solve your performance and maintainability problems while maintaining productivity.

Like C and C++, Go compiles to native machine code so that we don’t need environments such as CLR and JVM to run Go applications. This will give you a lot of advantages when you are distributing your applications through application containers such as Docker.

Another advantage of the Go compiler is that it compiles programs very quickly. That helps particularly when compiling large applications.

Simple and Minimalistic Language with Pragmatic Design

If you look deeply into Go’s design, it will surprise you because of its pragmatic, simple and minimalistic approach. For example, Go’s types are exported to other packages if the name starts with an uppercase letter. Types that start with lowercase will not export to other packages and the access will be restricted with the same package.

Go comes with very limited features, but it will not hurt your productivity, as all features required to build large applications are included. Go’s type system is very simple, following a pragmatic design that offers code reusability, productivity and extensibility.

Go Type System is Awesome

If you are coming from other programming languages, try to look at Go with a fresh mind so you can experience the power and pragmatic design of the Go language design. Go does not provides class keyword and its object-orientation is different from other object-oriented programming languages. If you are looking for something similar to classes in Go, you’ll find Go’s type struct. Go does not support inheritance in its type system, but it supports composition of types. If you are a pragmatic developer rather than into academics, composition over inheritance will excite you.

If you want to implement an interface into a struct type, you don’t need to explicitly implement the interface type along with the struct type definition. Instead, you just need to implement the methods defined in the interface into the struct type.

Here’s a sample that demonstrates the Go type system with interface and struct. It also explores type embedding for type composition.

Code Listing – 1

package main import “fmt” type People interface { SayHello() ToString() } type Person struct { name string age int phone string } //A person method func (p Person ) SayHello() { fmt.Printf(“Hi, I am %s, %d years oldn”, p.name, p.age) } //A person method func (p Person) ToString() { fmt.Printf(“[Name: %s, Age: %d, Phone: %s]n”, p.name,p.age, p.phone) } type Student struct { Person //type embedding for composition university string course string } type Developer struct { Person //type embedding for composition company string platform string } //Developer’s method overrides Person’s SayHello func (d Developer) SayHello() { fmt.Printf(“Hi, I am %s , %d years old, developer working on %s for %sn”, d.name,d.age,d.platform,d.company) } func main() { alex := Student{Person{“alex”, 21, “111-222-XXX”}, “MIT”,”BS CS”} john := Developer{Person{“John”, 35, “111-222-XXX”}, “Accel North America”, “Golang”} jithesh := Developer{Person{“Jithesh”, 33, “111-222-XXX”}, “Accel North America”, “Hadoop”} //An array with People types peopleArr := […]People{alex, john,jithesh} //Iterating through the array of People types and call methods. for n, _ := range peopleArr { peopleArr[n].SayHello() peopleArr[n].ToString() } }

package main

import “fmt”

type People interface {

SayHello()

ToString()

}

type Person struct {

name string

age int

phone string

}

//A person method

func (p Person ) SayHello() {

fmt.Printf(“Hi, I am %s, %d years oldn”, p.name, p.age)

}

//A person method

func (p Person) ToString() {

fmt.Printf(“[Name: %s, Age: %d, Phone: %s]n”, p.name,p.age, p.phone)

}

type Student struct {

Person //type embedding for composition

university string

course string

}

type Developer struct {

Person //type embedding for composition

company string

platform string

}

//Developer’s method overrides Person’s SayHello

func (d Developer) SayHello() {

fmt.Printf(“Hi, I am %s , %d years old, developer working on %s for %sn”,

d.name,d.age,d.platform,d.company)

}

func main() {

alex := Student{Person{“alex”, 21, “111-222-XXX”}, “MIT”,“BS CS”}

john := Developer{Person{“John”, 35, “111-222-XXX”}, “Accel North America”, “Golang”}

jithesh := Developer{Person{“Jithesh”, 33, “111-222-XXX”}, “Accel North America”, “Hadoop”}

//An array with People types

peopleArr := [...]People{alex, john,jithesh}

//Iterating through the array of People types and call methods.

for n, _ := range peopleArr {

peopleArr[n].SayHello()

peopleArr[n].ToString()

}

In the above sample code, we first declare an interface type named “People” with two methods – SayHello and ToString. We create a struct type Person and add two methods, SayHello and ToString. Unlike Java and C#, you don’t need to explicitly state that you are going to implement an interface into a type.

In Java, we would have to do the following to implement an interface:

Code Listing – 2

public class Person implements People{ //implementations here }

public class Person implements People{

//implementations here

}

In C#, we would have to do the following to implement an interface:

Code Listing – 3

public class Person : People{ //implementations here }

public class Person : People{

//implementations here

}

In Go, explicit declaration of interface implementation is not required and you just need to implement the methods defined in the interface into your struct type where you want to implement it. This simple design gives you a lot of advantages when it comes to building loosely-coupled systems in a productive manner.

After defining the struct type “Person”, we are embedding the type “Person” into struct type “Student” and “Developer”. In Go, composition is the preferred way over inheritance where type embedding is the way to implement composition. The design approach of using composition over inheritance will give you a lot of practical advantages when you build complex object-oriented systems. Since we are embedding type Person into type “Student” and “Developer”, the methods defined in the type “Person” will automatically be available for the type “Student” and “Developer”. You may feel that this is like inheritance, but it is true composition which has a lot of advantages over inheritance. We also override the method SayHello for type “Developer”. In the main function, which is the entry point of our sample program of Code Listing -1, we create an Array of People interface type and assign one “Person” object and two “Developer” objects, and finally iterate through the Array and call the methods.

alex := Student{Person{“alex”, 21, “111-222-XXX”}, “MIT”,”BS CS”} john := Developer{Person{“John”, 35, “111-222-XXX”}, “Accel North America”, “Golang”} jithesh := Developer{Person{“Jithesh”, 33, “111-222-XXX”}, “Accel North America”, “Hadoop”} //An array with People types peopleArr := […]People{alex, john,jithesh} //Iterating through the array of People types and call methods. for n, _ := range peopleArr { peopleArr[n].SayHello() peopleArr[n].ToString() }

alex := Student{Person{“alex”, 21, “111-222-XXX”}, “MIT”,“BS CS”}

john := Developer{Person{“John”, 35, “111-222-XXX”}, “Accel North America”, “Golang”}

jithesh := Developer{Person{“Jithesh”, 33, “111-222-XXX”}, “Accel North America”, “Hadoop”}

//An array with People types

peopleArr := [...]People{alex, john,jithesh}

//Iterating through the array of People types and call methods.

for n, _ := range peopleArr {

peopleArr[n].SayHello()

peopleArr[n].ToString()

}

If you look deeply into the code example we have demonstrated in the Code Listing -1, you will understand the power of Go’s type system. Go’s type system is the unique and most compelling feature of Go compared to many existing programming languages.

We will explore the features of the type system in upcoming posts about Go.

Concurrency is Built In Feature at Language Level

Our computers has evolved over the last decade. In the past, we programmed against computers with single CPU cores. But today, our servers have 32, 64, 128 and many more CPU cores, but we are still using programming languages and technologies designed in the era where only single core machines were available. These days, most programming languages provide support for concurrency through libraries and frameworks, but not at the core language level. In Go, concurrency is a first-class citizen in the core language. Go introduces Goroutines, which lets you run functions concurrently. You can communicate and pass values between Goroutines using Channels. Goroutines and Channels are great features of Go that let you leverage concurrency and parallelism in your applications with a more secure and efficient manner. Some of Go’s standard libraries have concurrency built in using Goroutines. For an example, the standard library “net/http” which provides support for programming on HTTP handles incoming requests concurrently using Goroutines.

Go Packages

Like other features of Go, packages also provide simplicity. Go programs are organized into file directories called packages, which enables code reusability across Go applications. We can import Go packages using the import keyword which lets you reuse code into your applications. In the Code Listing – 1, we import a package “fmt” from the standard library. By simply using the import statement, we can import packages from both the built in standard library and GOPATH, which is your Go project root directory in local machine. We can install third-party Go packages by using “Go get” command in the terminal.

Unlike other package management systems such as NPM, NuGet and RubyGems, Go does not provide a centralized repository for Go packages. The Go package management system is designed to work with modern scenarios where developers share source through repositories hosted on Github.

The following command in the terminal will install a third-party package “mgo” into your GOPATH which can be used across projects put on the GOPATH directory.

go get gopkg.in/mgo.v2

After installing the third-party package, just put the import statement in your programs for reusing the code, as shown below:

import ( “gopkg.in/mgo.v2” )

import (

“gopkg.in/mgo.v2”

)

Summary

Go is a surprisingly a simple programming language. The type system of Go enables code reusability through type embedding which promotes composition over inheritance. In Go, concurrency is a first-class citizen in the core language, letting you build high performance applications for modern computing environments. Go is a great language for building applications for distributed, concurrent and Cloud computing environments.

Shiju Varghese is a Solutions Architect who specializes in Cloud Computing solutions. He currently works as a Technical Architect for Accel Frontline.

InApps is a wholly owned subsidiary of Insight Partners, an investor in the following companies mentioned in this article: Docker.

Feature image via Flickr Creative Commons.

Source: InApps.net

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Phu Nguyen

As a Senior Tech Enthusiast, I bring a decade of experience to the realm of tech writing, blending deep industry knowledge with a passion for storytelling. With expertise in software development to emerging tech trends like AI and IoT—my articles not only inform but also inspire. My journey in tech writing has been marked by a commitment to accuracy, clarity, and engaging storytelling, making me a trusted voice in the tech community.