During my internship at IBM Singapore, I am using go lang to develop the back-end of the software. It is a nice new language, with a lot of features that I found really useful. Previously I have mostly used Java and JavaScript in programming, and go lang has the best of both.
First-Class Functions
I have always liked the flexibility with functions in JavaScript, the fact that you can treat functions like any other normal objects and pass them around. This advantage made me hate Java where methods are just methods.
In go lang, functions are surprising quite flexible, they can be used as values and passed around, and anonymous functions with closure are supported. All of these are still on top of statically-typed nature of the language.
Multiple Named return values
This is a great feature in my opinion. For Java and JavaScript, functions can only return one value, causing a lot of troubles when you want to do error checking or simply need to return multiple values. In go lang, the ability to return multiple values makes all of these very easy. On top of that, the return values can be named as variables in the function signature and saves the trouble of declaring them in the function’s body.
And more
Go lang also has great packaging system, allowing reusable components to be packaged and easily integrated into other projects. It has OOP-styled types like struct and interface. It also supports encoding and decoding of JSON internally.
I have not had a chance to use the multi-threading and concurrency components of the language, and I shall wait to be delighted.