Golang vs C++: Which is Best For You?

In this blog, I’ll talk about C++ and Golang both of them being great choices for software development, each having different pros and cons. By the end of this blog, you’ll be able to see what language suits you as a software developer.

Introduction

Software development is one of the most in-demand skills out there, people who love programming make the most of their knowledge to develop software for the general public.
Developers want the users to have their best time while browsing the software they developed,
But to do so developers need a tool that helps them build such effective software. There are multiple programming languages out there that like Java, Python, C++, Javascript, GO, Ruby, etc.

Here, we’ll talk about C++ and GO, also known as Golang which was initially built to fill the gaps in C++. You might think a language that was developed to fill gaps in C++ should be better than C++, right? Not quite so. To better understand which language is better for you as a developer we need to know more about C++ and GO.

C++ and Golang

C++ is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. It’s a cross-platform, open-source programming language used to develop high-performance applications, developed by Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension to C. As a programming language C++ provides high performance but can be very complex at times.

Back in 2007 some developers at Google were fed up with the complexity of C++ and wanted something much simpler which provides the same performance as C++, Python, or Java. They launched an open-source language named GO in 2009.

Why was Golang developed?

C++ was a nuisance to programmers all over the world. It was complex, hard to learn, compilation took too long, manual memory management wasn’t easy at all and even the readability was low.

“Go addressed these issues by attempting to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aimed to be modern, with support for networked and multicore computing.” FAQs, Origin, Go website.

The origin story on the official GO website tells us why GO was developed and what it provided us with.

Golang or C++? which is better

There are many plus points to Golang as a programming language like:

• Ease of development: Syntax is much simpler compared to C++ hence being easier to learn and write code in.
• Easy memory management: Memory management in GO is automatic which cuts most of the time programmers waste while manually managing memory in languages like C++.
• Faster compilation: Due to useful things like garbage collection, static typing, and goroutines.
• Garbage collection: It is a process that automatically frees the memory which is no longer in use.
• Readability: The code being simpler it is easier for developers to read and understand the code itself.

The syntax snippet below shows how to write “hello world” in Golang

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println("hello world")
}
Code language: Go (go)

Even if you never learned to Go you still might be able to understand the above code if you’re familiar with C.

While C++ is relatively very complex it provides high performance. C++ might seem complex because of various reasons like manual memory management and low readability. C++ is hard to learn and might take years for you to know what you’re doing with C++ but it will seem less complex and you will be a lot faster with it once you do so.

Key differences

The key difference between GO and C++ are:

• GO is simpler to code in as compared to C++.
• Memory management in C++ is manual, unlike GO which supports automatic memory management.
• GO compiles code faster than C++ because it uses Goroutines and channels for compilation. 
• GO doesn’t give as much flexibility as C++.
• C++ is an OOPs-based programming language while GO is procedural-based.

Language	Golang	C++
Compilation speed	Faster	Slower
Memory management	Automatic	Manual
Readability	Easier	Harder
Type of language	procedure based	OOPs based

Conclusion

There isn’t a thing like GO is better than C++ or vice versa. Both languages have their advantages over the other. C++ provides flexibility, higher performance, and effective memory management while GO provides ease of development, easier memory management, and faster compilation. The choice entirely depends on the developer If you prioritize performance then use C++ on the other hand if you want clarity and ease of development use GO at the cost of a slight performance bargain.