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Golang for JavaScript developers - Part 1

Deepu K Sasidharan on December 04, 2019

Originally published at deepu.tech. If you are a JavaScript developer thinking about learning another programming language, then Golang is a great...

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marcellothearcane • Dec 4 '19

if val := getVal(); val < 10 {
    return val
} else {
    return val + 1
}

This is not possible in JS

What does it do?

Vince Ramces Oliveros • Dec 5 '19

the variable is scoped to the if statement. Thus, it is much more readable. might be that the getVal() function would be like this.

func getVal() int{
    // return any number
    return 0
}

compare to javascript

// given by the example. the `val` is mutable
let val = getVal()
if(val < 10){
   return val
}
else{
  return val + 1
}

nmhillusion • Dec 5 '19

in golang,
after if block, variable val continues existing? Or it just exists in the if block?

Vince Ramces Oliveros • Dec 5 '19

val is no longer accessible after the if statement. the variable is scoped to the if block

Deepu K Sasidharan • Dec 5 '19

Thanks

Deepu K Sasidharan • Dec 5 '19

Sorry, I should have explained it better. I'll update the post

Brad • Dec 5 '19

Awesome article, the only thing I feel like is missing the reason why a JavaScript developer should learn GoLang over other languages. 🤔

Freedom • Dec 13 '19

A good reason for me, to port a backend Nodejs to a single Go binary, I can run without any dependencies or installation e.g. virtual machine/runtime, this help to reduce security vulnerabilities and improve reliability.

Deepu K Sasidharan • Dec 5 '19

Well, IMO there is no strong reasons to specifically learn Go except that it is easier to start with. But IMO JS is not a perfect language and hence JS developers would greatly benefit by learning a few other languages which will help to make them more pragmatic. It helped me for sure.

Erebos Manannán • Dec 6 '19

Golang has a massive number of benefits over many other languages. However, "a JavaScript developer" is too vague a concept to list any specific benefits to them.

Some significant benefits:

Quick compilation time
Good ecosystem with lots of well made libraries
Widespread standardization and tooling for e.g. automatic code formatting and static analysis
Compiles easy to distribute binaries without external dependencies
Cross-compilation is easy in most cases (I believe as long as you don't link to C code), so you can just set up one build pipeline and loop through a number of GOOS and GOARCH variables and get the build results easily
Concurrency is incredibly well handled in Golang - no need to worry about threads and other such things manually, but it's easy to control when things are executed in parallel and to communicate between "goroutines"

Brad • Dec 5 '19

I've learned a bit of Go and I agree it is a clear straight forward language, which makes it easy to learn, very similar to Python in those regards.

Hamilton Chevez • Dec 5 '19

When and what will part 2 be about, released?

Deepu K Sasidharan • Dec 5 '19

I mentioned what is covered in part 2 at the end of this post. I'll still need to finish up a few topics there but you can expect it start of next week