Characteristics of Go
This lesson discusses the aspects that make Go a successful language in the programming world.
We'll cover the following...
Features of Go
Go is essentially an imperative (procedural, structural) language, built with concurrency in mind. It is not truly object-oriented like Java and C++ because it doesn’t have the concepts of classes and inheritance. However, it does have a concepts of interfaces, with which much of the polymorphism can be implemented. Go has a clear and expressive type-system, but it is lightweight and without hierarchy. So in this respect, it could be called a hybrid language.
Some features of modern OOP languages were intentionally left out. Because, object orientation was too heavy often leading to cumbersome development constructing big type-hierarchies, and so not compliant with the speed goal of the language. As per the decision made by the Go-team, the following OOP features are missing from Golang. Although, some of them might still be implemented in its future versions.
- To simplify the design, no function or operator overloading was added.
- Implicit conversions were excluded to avoid the many bugs and confusion arising from this in languages like C/C++.
- No classes and type inheritance is supported in Golang.
- Golang does not support variant types. However, almost the same functionality is realized through