Why use Go for REST API development?

REST services are trivial in the modern web. SOA (which we discuss in more detail later) created an activity space for REST services to take web development to the next level. Go is a programming language from the house of Google for solving the bigger problems they have. It has been over ten years since its first appearance. It matured along the way with the developer community jumping in and creating huge-scale systems in it.

We could choose Python or JavaScript (Node.js) for our REST API development, but the main advantage of Go lies in its speed and compile-time error detection. Go has been proven to be faster than dynamic programming languages in terms of computational performance according to various benchmarks. These are the three reasons why a company should write their next API in Go:

• To scale your API for a wider audience
• To enable your developers to build robust systems
• To start simple and go big

As we progress through this book, we learn how to build efficient REST services in Go.