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Go for data processing

This site contains materials for a workshop on using Go for data processing.

Here are some subjective comments on why you might want to learn Go.

Go is an excellent "utility language" that is being adopted by organizations that manage large volumes of data. It is also being used to develop tools for data management and system maintenance. Important utilities for maintaining cloud infrastructure such as Kubernetes and Docker are written in Go.

Every programming language involves tradeoffs. Go is stricter and simpler than Python, but less strict than Rust and less complex than either Rust or Julia. The simplicity of Go makes it easy to maintain and refactor Go code, and generally makes Go code easy to read and understand. On the other hand, this simplicity means that it can be necessary to write more "boilerplate code" than in other languages. Some people feel that it is harder to develop an an "abstraction" of the problem that you are trying to solve when using Go, but other people argue that Go supports abstractions, just in a different way. While Go is much faster than Python, it is not quite as fast as C, C++, or Rust.

At present, Go is one of the 10 most used programming lanuages, according to Tiobe. However it is not commonly encountered in academic or research settings, especially in data science. This may be due to the success of the Python/C++ ecosystem (using C++ to implement algorithms and Python to script them). However it is not uncommon to encounter tasks where no appropriate C++ library routine exists, and where Python would be very slow. At present, this may be the best use-case for Go. More important than that, learning Go will make anyone a better overall programmer. Since it is somewhat closer to the hardware than, say, Python, it will help you understand how computers and compilers work, and will reveal some of the trade-offs in programming language design.

Compiling and running a simple Go program

Go scripts can be placed anywhere in your file system. Go packages that are able to be used by other Go programs should be placed in your GOHOME directory, which defaults to the directory named "go" in the top level of your home directory, i.e. ~/go.

Go source files are text files with suffix ".go". A very simple Go program is:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Printf("This is a Go program...\n")
}

Suppose you save this in a file called simple.go in your current working directory. You should be able to run it using the command go run simple.go. Alternatively, you can compile it to an executable using go build simple.go. This will produce a binary executable called simple in your local directory, which you can then run using ./simple.

Go resources