My boss asked me to do a report on what is the future of GO.
Where is GO heading to ? How much funding is it getting ? What parts of the IT market does it intend to compete for in the near future ?
The thing is, there are some people in my company claiming that “GO is a dead language”. This influences the amount of project/funding given to whatever GO developers we have.
How do you feel about GO ? Is it a good investment, does it have the potential to surpass Java as the most use programming language ?
I would have thought that the benefits of Go were readily apparent. A concise, type safe language built around concurrency whose standard library has the answer to most of the things you need on the modern web such as JSON parsing and http servers. It was designed to change very little after the 1.0 implementation, intentionally so. Go is a community project and is developed open source.
It seems GO is well installed in system programming especially when you need a good mix of performance and easiness. You’ll find it in Docker and Elastic search beats. A lot of startups are considering GO as the best option when it comes to micro services. And quite funny is the fact that many companies are facing shortage in GO developers when some of them dismiss its qualities … You can look here : https://jaxenter.com/languages-rankings-143464.html
By the way, a recruiter confirmed lately that GO developers were the new gold : hard to find, very expensive ( very good earnings).
This is one thing I’ve been trying to figure out lately: when you say recruiters are looking for Go developers, are they looking for programmers that know Go to develop software in a multitude of application fields? Or are they looking for programmers that know, say, Kubernetes, and since it’s written in Go, they add “proficient with Go” to the list of requirements? Strange as it might sound, I’ve found more of the later and less of the former. Am I looking in the wrong places?
From my experience you’re right, a lot of current jobs mention GO as a bonus not as the main requirement. These types of jobs seem to be related to devops as you noticed. But if you search among startups you’ll find many of them interested by GO. Some of them have elected GO as their main language. Have a look at https://angel.co
I’ve found 456 jobs among 11635 (fulltime / software engineer) mentioning or requiring GO. That’s not bad for a “confidential” language. And yes, in France, GO is not very widespread. Nonetheless, I’m contacted regularly by recruiters for GO jobs and it seems they’re struggling to find GO developper.