Is Google's Go All Set To Replace JAVA For Enterprise Development?

Now and then when we look around the world, we find at least one new programming language that is giving the others a good run for their money. Apart from their differences, all of them have one thing in common- they crave for a developer's attention.

People who are using a particular language like JAVA for years are most entrenched in its classes and object-oriented approach to enterprise development. But, there might be some shortcomings of the language and the changing requirements of enterprises to stay in the game that pushes developers to explore more.

JAVA was written more than two decades ago, and it became instantly successful because it was a notch higher than C and C++. The object-oriented approach immediately resonated with the enterprises, and they were quick to adopt it. But, as times change the relevancy of JAVA reduced as compared to its launch. It leads us to today when we have an equally competitive programming language from Google.

Welcome Go, Google's light-weight newcomer with plenty of fresh approaches and new punches. Since people across the world are moving away from traditional server-side development of applications, Go could be the next big thing. Research indicates that Go has a more significant market share than JAVA when it comes to being used by websites with higher traffic.

Go is rapidly establishing itself as the easy to implement programming language and filling the gaps created by JAVA. Developers are finding it the go-to programming language for creating large complicated and scalable applications. However, it would be unfair to compare JAVA with Go, considering the decades that JAVA has served people efficiently. While JAVA is heating the world with its latest release, Go is currently being used in top-notch projects that drive innovation across the globe. For example, the famous containerization platform Docket is built on Go.

The short history of Google's Go or Golang can be instantly related to its relevancy in the market. Because JAVA was launched years ago, it has lately struggled to keep with new processes and dynamics of enterprises. Go, on the other hand, is crisp and written for today's' web applications. Stack Overflow's last year survey indicated that Go is the 13th most popular programming language number 5 on the list of 'Most loved, Dreaded and Wanted.'

JAVA's inability to keep up with emerging technologies like the Cloud is what gives GO an upper hand. Although, in its latest last month release of the Jakarta EE, JAVA finally takes a step into the Cloud. Go's architecture is fundamentally designed for cloud-based applications acting as a catalyst for the way people build the web today.

While Go doesn't provide any virtual machine like JAVA, it is still eating into JAVA's share of developers. One of the reasons for this could be Go's Mobile repository that includes mobile support for iOS and Android, along with other Java software developmental tools. Let's take a close at some crucial features that will help decide whether Go will replace JAVA in the future-

Memory Management
When it comes to managing memory, Go compiles directly on the machine code and executes instantly. This practice results in the most efficient management of memory. Go's object-oriented and somewhat functional approach makes it a language that is somewhere between C and C++.

JAVA, on the other hand, requires the Java Virtual Machine to compile. It is a combination of both interpretation and compilation. Once the bytecode is interpreted in the java virtual machine, it generates a machine code that is finally executed by the system in which the application runs. Therefore memory management in JAVA is done by the JVM itself. It has an inbuilt garbage collection for performing automatic memory management tasks.

Threads
JAVA has comparatively much simpler threads, which makes it challenging for various applications to run independently. But, people love JAVA for its simple and easy to comprehend models that perform great when mapping to different cores.

Go's users, however, are in awe of the coroutines and channels. It does add a knotty layer of complexity, but it is not one of Go's faults. Instead, the complex nature of the problem is to be blamed.

Light-weight Loads
When it comes to threads, JAVA makes it dead simple. It may seem less complicated and easy to understand as compared to coroutines in Go but has a heavy hidden price. Each of the hit from a server to the website in JAVA needs its thread, making it cumbersome and heavy.

Go's coroutines, however, are light-weight and more flexible. They are linked with synchronization queues called channels and are more sophisticated.

Modern Tools
JAVA is a well-engineered core-based development language that is more mature and experienced at understanding real-world problems for enterprises. Meanwhile, Go is a modern approach to multi-thread programming designed to tackle the current challenges of enterprises.

Conclusion
A look at the nuances of development concepts helps us provide a detailed picture of the JAVA vs. Go battle. No doubt that Go handles the current hassles of enterprise development in its fresh and innovative ways. But, it does come at individual costs. For enterprises looking forward to rapid prototyping Go might not be the best option. Considering last year's TIOBE index that ranked Go as the 12th most popular programming language, we might find it taking over JAVA as a cloud-based enterprise development language.