Go for CLIs

The very same overarching reasons I suggest engineers learn Go are the very same reasons I suggest using Go to build your CLI, but the very history of modern CLIs, which began in the 1960s with the UNIX shell, invented at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Golang, holds much weight. The UNIX philosophy, which inspires our modern CLI philosophy and guidelines, is built into the language, and it’s clear that many benefits have been born out of this way of thinking:

• Performance, scalability, and power

Golang is quite fast in its compilation and execution. For example, Kubernetes, which is written in Go, has 5 million lines of application code that compile within a couple of minutes. Any other language would take 10 minutes to several hours to compile. Go translates its source code to machine code within its own optimized compiler, allowing easier dependency management. Also, because Golang is still a young language, it’s built for contemporary hardware requirements.

Goroutines are lightweight threads that run concurrently. In my experience programming, I have not seen simplicity and multi-threading go hand in hand, but Golang achieves this extremely well. This feature won my heart.

The performance and scalability of Go are an obvious draw to the cloud computing community. Many CLIs for cloud computing were written in Go, Docker and Kubernetes included. Any application with a growing user base or a high number of traffic requests needs to consider Golang. Companies such as Uber and Comcast have chosen Go for this reason as well.

• Simplification of development

Golang felt easier to learn than any other language I’ve ever encountered. The language supports a clean, simple, and fast environment, which is impressive, considering the powerful tools that Go has created. Golang also has many tools that allow the speed and accuracy of development, including formatting tools, testing frameworks, a great linter, and tools to perform static analysis.

• Versatility

Go makes cross-compilation so easy. You can build your application for many different OSs and architectures, increasing accessibility to your CLI. Although executing within different environments, if properly configured, it will work similarly. This will ease users’ minds. Later on in this book, we will discuss how to create binaries for different platforms.

• Growing your skillset

Golang is among the most popular languages to learn. Given its many apparent benefits, more start-ups and enterprises are choosing Golang and the demand for Golang developers is growing.

• Community

If you choose Go, you’ll be a part of a community of enthusiastic open source developers, willing to partake in the evolutionary journey of a young programming language.

For beginners who are building a CLI in Go for the first time, the next chapters ahead show how clear it is. Golang is an excellent choice for building a CLI, and when there’s a need for scalability, performance, and cross compilation, the choice will play in your favor.