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Can Go be used for Web Development

Go for Web Development

Can Go be used for Web Development?

Yes, Go can be used for web development using frameworks like Buffalo, Flamingo, Gin, and many others.

Since its design by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson at Google 2012, Go has grown in popularity and usage in web development and other software development fields. It is loved and respected by many developers and companies.

A 2022 Stack Overflow Survey reported that Go is loved by 64.58% of professional developers versus 35.42% of developers who dreaded it.


According to statistics from w3techs.com, “Go is used by less than 0.1% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know.”

Unlike many other server-side programming languages, Go’s usage for web development has been increasing over the years, slowly becoming a popular choice for many companies and businesses.

Go is designed to build fast, reliable, and efficient software at scale. Its efficiency and syntax are similar to C, but its readability and usability are similar to Python or Javascript, making it very easy to get started with.

Go is used widely for Web development projects, DevOps & Site Reliability, Cloud & Network Services, and command-line interfaces. About 11.15% of professional developers use Go for a variety of software development purposes.

GO WEB DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORKS

In order to make it easy and quick to work with Go for web development, there are many frameworks that you can use, some of the popular ones include

  • Buffalo: A rapid web development framework in Go
  • Echo: a high-performance, extensible, and minimalist Go web framework
  • Flamingo: a fast open-source framework based on Go with clean and scalable architecture
  • Gorilla: a web toolkit for Go
  • Gin: a Go HTTP web framework
  • Gotherjs: a compiler from Go to JavaScript allowing developers to write front-end code in Go
  • Goth: an authentication package for web apps in Go
  • Beego: an MVC framework for building full-stack web applications with Go
  • Fiber: a fast HTTP engine for Go
  • Iris: a Go web framework for creating high-performance web applications.

And many others.

Go is loved and trusted by many developers and companies. Some of the popular companies using Go include:

  • Twitter
  • Uber
  • Cloudflare
  • American Express
  • Capital One
  • Paypal
  • Bitly
  • Meta
  • Wild Life
  • Allegro
  • Armut
  • Curve
  • Cockroach Labs
  • Dropbox
  • Monzo
  • Netflix
  • Trivago
  • Microsoft
  • Grail
  • Mercado Libre
  • Salesforce
  • Twitch
  • Stream
  • SIXT
  • Google
  • Riot Games
  • Target, and many others.

If for some reason you have difficulties using Go for web development, there are many other alternatives that you can use for frontend and server-side programming.

ARE THERE ALTERNATIVES TO GO FOR WEB DEVELOPMENT?

Yes, there are many server-side programming languages and frameworks that you can use as alternatives to Go. Here are some of the popular ones

PHP

PHP is the most popular server-side programming language, it powers more websites on the internet than the rest of the server-side programming languages put together.

According to statistics from w3techs.com, “PHP is used by 77.5% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know.” PHP website usage has been decreasing over the years, but it will take more than 25 years to decrease to 50% at the rate at which it is decreasing.

To make your development process easy, quick, and well-structured, you can use PHP frameworks such as Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter, Slim, Zend, Phalcon, CakePHP, and many others.

PHP is used by many popular platforms and websites such as WordPress, Drupal, Wikipedia, Facebook, Slack, Etsy, Tumblr, MailChimp, etc. PHP is simple to work with and it is a great alternative to Go.

NODE.JS

Node.js is an open-source Javascript runtime environment that runs on the V8 Engine. It is cross-platform and is used to run Javascript outside of the web browser. Node.js is used by web developers for server scripting.

It is commonly used in the Javascript stack such as the MERN (MongoDB, Express.js, React, Node) and MEAN (MongoDB, Express, Angular, Node) Stack. To make it easy to work with Node.js, frameworks such as Express.js, Sails.js, Koa.js, etc. are popularly used.

You can use Node.js as an alternative to Go, especially if you like working with Javascript.

PYTHON

Python has an easy-to-understand syntax that makes it easy to write code. Getting started with Python is much easier than with Go. Python is used a lot by web developers for backend development. According to a 2021 Stack Overflow survey, Python is the third most used programming language by professional developers.

Python Django is one of the most popular web development frameworks, it was used to build part of the Instagram backend. Other python web frameworks that can be used in place of the Go include Flask, FastAPI, CherryPy, Falcon, etc.

JAVA

You can also use Java as an alternative to Go for server-side programming. Java is used by many websites, especially in the enterprise world.

You can learn more about how Java is used in Web Development in our article DO YOU NEED JAVA FOR WEB DEVELOPMENT?

RUBY

Since its invention in 1995 by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto of Japan, Ruby has grown in popularity and usage to become the third most widely used server-side programming language after PHP and ASP.NET.

According to statistics from w3techs.com, “Ruby is used by 5.9% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know.”

Ruby’s usage for making websites has been decreasing over the years, but it is still one of the popular choices for many companies and startups.

Ruby is much easier to work with than Go, its syntax is simple, elegant, and English-like, similar to that of Python.

Getting started with Ruby and Ruby on Rails for web development is very easy and you will serve a lot of development time by using this language and its framework.

The popular online E-commerce store builder Shopify was written in Ruby (Ruby on Rails). Other popular websites using Ruby include Twitter, Github, Basecamp, Airbnb, Dribbble, Hulu, Kickstarter, Zendesk, Fiverr, SoundCloud, and many others.

CONCLUSION

It can be seen that Go can be used for web development and it is becoming a popular choice among developers and companies for building full-stack web applications and cloud & network services.

If you want to make a website without writing any server-side or frontend code, you can use Website builders like Bubble, WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Zyro, etc. to do all the heavy lifting for you. You can make powerful websites without writing any lines of code.

Can Go be used for Web Development
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