Initially released in 2009 by a team at Google, there are various pros and cons of Golang development. Though, Golang became widely popular today. The language was thoughtfully designed based on their core philosophy and every aspect of the language adheres to it.

There are features that are “standalone” pros or cons that anybody could agree with and there are other features that are viewed as an advantage by some and disadvantage by others.

So, instead of going through pros and cons individually which sometimes refer to the same feature, I will go through some of the features and explain the pros and cons of it. Please see that this is not an exhaustive list of everything good and bad with Go.

Minimalism & Readability:

Go places a strong emphasis on readability and minimalism. It has only a small number of orthogonal program constructs that are combined in tiny but powerful ways. Go also provides methods for automatic formatting of your code.

The greatest advantage of this makes golang development easy. However, due to a firm adherence to these, Go has chosen to omit some of the modern developments in programming language design and also places several restrictions.

High Performance:

Go is a compiled language and it is mainly because of that the programs written in Go run very fast. This high performance and being compiled is generally beneficial for all but has a slight disadvantage when someone tries ad hoc importing.

Also, Go compiler supports cross-compilation which lets you compile your code for a different target machine other than the current working one.

Automatic memory management:

Golang has a garbage collector that can manage memory and resolve any issues in it. As it provides memory safely, it is highly advantageous for people using it. However, GC can be resource-intensive and cause latency in running of the program.

Concurrency:

Concurrent functions are the ones that can run while the other functions are running. This is extremely useful when you want to take advantage of multiple cores and write tasks that run without needing to wait for others to complete. Go has built-in support for concurrency which lets you create and manage concurrent functions easily.

One particular disadvantage with Go’s concurrency is that it may lead to race conditions. However, Go provides race condition detection but it works only after race condition actually happened.

Standard Library:

Having a standard library that does all the generally important functions is important for any programming language. Go also has an excellent standard library that helps to do a large number of high level tasks including … . 

Its support for Networking and web applications is widely praised. But, the disadvantage that programmers find with a standard library is that it does not contain adequate libraries for machine learning and AI.

The standard library also involves an automatic documentation tool called godoc. Godoc parses your source code and after reading your functions, variables and comments, it creates an HTML or plain text documentation! While it is related to that of Javadoc or Docstring, godoc is much simpler.

By this, I am hoping that you got a brief and general idea about the pros and cons of Golang development. A little fun fact: The language is just called Go, but the term “Golang” became popular with their website golang.org which is taken as “go.org” was unavailable!