Python vs Golang

Python vs Go

Both Python and Go (Golang) have made some splash in the web development community, but they could not be more different. Python is a relatively old, object-oriented and interpreted programming language with a wide and active following. Go is a Google-backed compiled language created with developers learning and mastering it quickly in mind, and with a goal of obtaining C++-level performance without all the extra hassle. They both have their advantages and loud supporters. They have both been growing at impressive rates over the last few years. But which one is best for your project? You’re about to find out. This is Go language vs. Python: the final throw down.

Python vs. Go: in numbers

TIOBE Index

The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages compiled monthly and based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors using a given language. You can read more about the index and the organization at: https://www.tiobe.com/

• Python has been climbing the TOBIE rankings in recent years, jumping to the second place just in November 2020 and still rising at an impressive rate. Go is climbing fast, jumping 7 positions in comparison to last year. Its impressive growth can be credited in part to Google’s intensive use of the language.

• Python has been TOBIE’s language of the year three times, and was most recently crowned in 2018. Go, even with such a lower percentage of users, has been awarded twice! First in 2009, year of its release, and then again in 2016.

Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow’s 2020 was the 9th consecutive year for the survey with 90,000 developers responding. More information on SO’s website: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/

• Python is over 4x more popular according to Stack Overflow’s 2020 survey, with Go still below 10%. 40% of professionals and 44% of all respondents use Python, and both languages rank really high for “love” of the language, defined as % of users who have expressed interest in counting to develop in it (62% for Go, 67% for Python.)

GitHub users

GitHub is one of the world’s largest code development platforms. It is the largest host of source code in the world with more than 40 million users and over 100 million repositories (including at least 28 million public repositories). Ben Frederickson used GitHub’s archives to track programming languages its users write code in. Every user interaction with a repository is counted as using the language of that repository. The aggregated number gives the Monthly Active Users (MAU) each language has. More info on methodology and sources: https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-languages-by-github-users/

• Python is over 3x more popular amongst GitHub users, but Go’s impressive upward trend is not to be discarded. It’s steadily growing in popularity, which was evidenced by its title of Language to Learn in 2018, based on the increase in its use on GitHub.
• According to GitHub Octoverse, however, between 2018/2019, Python grew even more in its user base than Go, both languages exceeding 140% change in their use (Python grew by 151% and Go by 147%)

Other rankings comparing Python vs. Go in numbers

• Number of pull requests in a given language is used to rank programming languages in GitHub Octoverse
• How likely programmers are to switch a language was measured using blog posts discussing moving from one language to another in order to rank programming languages by Erik Bernhardsson
• Number of people transitioning languages on GitHub was used by the team at sourced

Python vs. Golang from the managerial perspective 

• Go vs. Python: performance and efficiency

• Points for Go
• Because Go is a compiled language with roots in C, it’s great for developing performance-sensitive programs. It also complies very fast, with much lower compilation times than Java or C++.  
• Depending on the problem used to test the speed of execution, Go is between 4x and 100x faster than Python.

• Issues with Go
• Some have described the language as “verbose”, which also means it requires more lines of code than Python to achieve the same functionality. 

• This also means potentially lower efficiency of programmers relative to their personhours.

• Issues with Python
• Because of its interpreted nature, Python is much slower in terms of execution than Go is. 
• Also, writing multithreaded programs is more complex because of a global interpreter lock. 
• Points for Python
• However, because producing code in Python is much quicker than in Go, creating and developing an app takes less time. 
• Python allows for a higher level of abstraction making expressing more complex logic easier. This in turn leads to getting solutions for some classes of problems more quickly.
• Many libraries requiring native performance bind into native code written in C or Fortran from Python allowing for faster code combined with the ease of use of Python.

• Scalability

• Points for Go
• Because Golang was actually developed with scalability in mind, to help developers at Google solve problems at Google-scale, it is incredibly scalable. It has been described as a language that “basically involves thousands of programmers working on large server software hosted on thousands of clusters”.
• This is also why Go has inbuilt support for concurrent process channeling (concurrency).
• Issues with Python
• Programs written in Python are not easy to scale. This is partly because the language doesn’t support concurrency. 

• Applications

• Points for Python
• Python is widely used in artificial intelligence, data analytics, deep learning, and web development. This is often credited to the impressive set of libraries available in Python. 
• Python also has growing applications in fintech, and is increasingly popular in web development.
• Issues with Python
• Python is not great for mobile development so it’s not best for cross-platform solutions with mobile apps.

• Points for Go
• Go is mostly used for systems programming. Because it supports concurrency, it is also gaining popularity in cloud computing and cluster computing. 
• Because it’s a programming language created by one of the world's biggest tech companies, and pushed for in Google’s day-to-day work, it’s also gaining traction in web development. This is also in part thanks to its powerful and easy use of libraries that can help you set up a web server incredibly quick.

Python vs. Go from developer perspective 

Developers focus on different features when looking for a language to learn and develop in.

• Learning curve and syntax

• Points for Python
• Python is often considered to be one of the easiest programming languages to learn due to its simple and readable syntax. 
• Points for Go
• Go also has superbly clear syntax which holds zero unnecessary components (this was the creators’ intention). 
• It was designed with training inexperienced developers in mind. It’s meant to be very easy to start and get good at.

• Web frameworks

• Issues with Go
• Go doesn’t have a single dominant framework like Django. Although there are several projects that provide frameworks for Go (Revel, Iris, Echo, Macaron or Buffalo), the lack of a dominant framework may prove disadvantageous for anyone looking to build a simple CRUD API. 
• Most Go users argue that Go needs no framework; this may be true for some projects, but typing in all the code manually may end up very time-consuming.
• Points for Python
• Not only does Python have a widely-regarded, dominant framework (Django) it also offers well-liked alternatives such as Flask. Both frameworks are very helpful in multitude of tasks, e.g. helping you build complex websites with more resources without the need to type all the code in manually.
• What’s more, Python has many frameworks designed specifically for using machine learning, such as Keras, PyTorch, Scikit-Learn, TensorFlow, and many others.

• Debugging

• Points for Go
• Go’s web programming offers a smoother debugging process. Since the language is statically-typed, it signals some errors at compile time (not at execution like in Python). 
• Issues with Python
• Although Python has a decent debugger, as a dynamically-typed language it checks for bugs at run-time, making it more prone to errors.

• Libraries

• Points for Python
• Python has a staggering amount of libraries available concerning a variety of fields. 
• There are, e.g. Numpy which helps you with array handling and complex matrix functions, Tensorflow and Scikit Learn for Deep Learning, OpenCV for image processing, Pandas for Data Analysis, or matplotlib for visualization
• Points for Go
• When Go was being developed, its creators at Google selected the most important libraries to be part of the inbuilt Go libraries. Although it falls (very) short in numbers, the usage fields coverage is not much less. 
• Go sports impressive libraries for database handling, concurrent programming, encryption, and web development.
• Issues with Go
• Because it has less organic community, it offers much poorer library support than 

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• Community support

• Points for Python 
• Python has a wide and active following of dedicated developers, which means it’s both stable and well-documented. You can find libraries and code samples for almost anything you can think of.
• Using Python, an open-source language, comes with a wealth of experience and already developed code just waiting to be accessed.
• Issues with Go
• As a relatively young language, and one that is intrinsically bound to its corporate sponsor, Google, Go has a much smaller and much less active community. There’s definitely less user-generated content to be accessed and the community overall is less important for its development.

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Python vs. Go: summary

Python is a chief language of data scientists, while Go is the language for web services. If you want to run software, Go’s incredible speed (partly caused by its support for concurrency) will come in handy. However, if you’re looking to do anything in data analysis, machine learning or other data-heavy projects, Python is the clear winner. What’s more, while Python bows down to Go in terms of speed of code execution, it's simple and readable code, supported by an incredibly vast array of libraries and a dedicated vibrant community, makes it much faster to develop. So where speed of developing a project is key, Python will be your best bet. However, it needs to be noted that Golang is constantly being developed, and its community is growing at a pace, so who knows what capabilities it will hold in the future. Below you’ll find a quick review of what a given language is best for. Make your choices carefully.

Python vs. Golang: differences and uses