Why Golang should be your go-to language for developing blockchains

Since the inception of blockchain about a decade ago, it has quickly caught the attention of developers and tech giants all around the world (such as IBM, Amazon, and Facebook, Kakao Talk, Line corporation). Blockchain is not only disrupting the traditional financial industry but many other sectors are looking to adopt it. It has initiated a new debate inside the developers’ community: which programming language is best for blockchains? A major chunk of developers in the blockchain community have preferred Golang as their go-to language for blockchain development. Ethereum core developer Péter Szilágyi says: “From Ethereum’s perspective, at least from all of the challenges that we’ve had, the advantages that are super-nice are that Go is really suitable for multithreaded networking applications. Because you have all these goroutines and channels, even really complex code and interactions can be simplified quite a lot. Also, one thing that’s a huge advantage is that Go is super-simple to read.” [1] So let us break this down.

Scalability in Distributed Systems
Golang is built for distributed systems. Decentralization of the blockchain is a subset of distributed computing. Microservices built using Golang can be easily scaled to millions of requests due to some inherent features, such as Goroutines, of Golang itself. Goroutines give that edge to Golang for concurrent programming. While other languages use threads to achieve concurrency, Golang uses Goroutines. The main difference here is that Goroutines only take up 4KBs of RAM space, while threads occupy 1MB and deadlock handling in Golang is swift and seamless. This means Golang can carry out 250x more concurrent operations compared to other languages such as Python and Java. This is what Péter Szilágyi was pointing towards, Go is really suitable for multi-threaded applications due to its features of concurrency: Goroutines.

Performance Aside from its advantages in distributed networks, Golang is one of the performant languages along with RUST. Golang is not an interpreted language, it is compiled directly to machine code. This means execution time for Golang will almost always be better than languages such as interpreter base programming languages Python. Various tests have shown Golang to be faster than other popular languages such as Java and Python.

See more at this link: https://www.rnssol.com/blog/why-golang-should-be-your-go-to-language-for-developing-blockchains