Learning Go

Preface

I've been doing web development for roughly 20 years. When I was in college, we were using Macromedia Flash and Macromedia dreamweaver. Yes, you read that right, this is before Adobe bought Macromedia. Aside from the html and css that are on every website; the first programming language I used was PHP and javascript for dom manipulation (jquery). Since that time, I have dabbled in Ruby, Python, Node and Elixir. My favorite of the languages is Javascript (or Typescript), as I enjoy the syntax and the number of packages available. Being able to write javascript server side and client side is nice. Despite my joy of JS, I know it may not be the best for all jobs. One of the languages I see heralded online for its performance and DX (developer experience) is Go or Golang from Google.

What is Go?

Wikipedia goes on to say the designers were motivated by the dislike of the C++ language. C++ is on my list of things to spend more time with but for now, I will focus on using Go. The standard library has most of what any developer would need and keeps them for having to reach for third party tools. The static typing allows for great IDE support. It does not require a VM and has sound uses in networking and CLI.

What will I use it for?

I went through the walk-thru on the website, and I do enjoy the language and syntax. I find it easier to read than some of the other languages I have worked through. To help learn the language, I found this (GitHub repo)[https://github.com/miguelmota/golang-for-nodejs-developers]. It helps keep track of the syntax differences which has made learning it go much faster.

I am going to re-write an App that I had started working on that I called (network-mapper)[/blog/network-mapper]. The (GitHub repo)[https://github.com/bskimball/network-mapper] shows that this is a javascript application using fastify for the backend and Solid.js for the frontend. I had noticed some performance issues running nmap scans in the original app, so I am wondering if using Go resolves that issue.

I will still keep Solid.js as my frontend, although I am switching to kobalte for the accessible components. The other change is I think I will scrap the postgres database for SQLite as it's more portable and easier to install. I decided to use the (Echo framework)[https://echo.labstack.com/] although I also looked at Revel. I plan to serve a embedded vite SPA. I used (this guide)[https://dev.to/aryaprakasa/serving-single-page-application-in-a-single-binary-file-with-go-12ij] to set up the embedded SPA.

I will set up a GitHub repo with the new project once I get a little further along.