Role of Go in microservice development
Over the last decade, the Go programming language has become one of the most popular languages for application development. There have been many factors contributing to its success, including its simplicity, ease of writing network applications, and an ability to easily develop parallel and concurrent applications.
Additionally, the larger developer community has played a key role in raising its popularity across all types of developers. The Go community is welcoming to everybody, from people just starting their journeys into programming to seasoned experts with decades of experience building different types of applications.
The Go standard library provides a set of packages that can often be enough for building a complete web application or an entire service, sometimes without even requiring any external dependencies. Many developers have been fascinated by the ease of writing applications and tools performing network calls, data serialization and encoding, file processing, and many other types of common operations.
This simplicity, paired with fast and efficient compilation into native binaries as well as rich tooling, made it one of the primary languages for writing web tools and services. The high adoption of the Go language for web service development made it one of the primary choices for writing microservices across the industry.
The biggest advantages of Go for microservice development include the following:
- Smooth learning curve: As one of the critical aspects of application development in growing teams, the simplicity of the Go language helps reduce the onboarding time for new, inexperienced developers.
- Explicit error handling: While being a hot topic in the Go community, error handling in Go encourages explicit handling of all application errors. It aligns with one of the key principles of microservice development of designing applications for failure.
- Useful standard library: The Go standard library includes lots of packages that can be used in production-grade systems without requiring external solutions.
- Community support: The Go community is among the biggest in the industry and the most popular libraries get enough support and maintenance.
- Ease of writing concurrent code: Concurrent calls are very common in microservice application logic - microservices often call multiple other services and combine their results. Writing concurrent code in Golang can be a fairly trivial task when utilizing the built-in sync package and core language features, such as channels and Goroutines.
The growth of the Go community has increased the rate of development of additional libraries for the language and resulted in the creation of the entire ecosystem of tools, powering application logging, debugging, and implementations of all widely used networking protocols and standards. The community keeps growing and the rate of new releases is only accelerating.