When comparing Go vs Django, the Slant community recommends Go for most people. In the question“What are the best web frameworks to create a web REST API?” Go is ranked 2nd while Django is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Go is:
The language is designed in a manner that seems logical. Syntax is simplified to reduce burden on the programmer and compiler developers.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Simplified C-like syntax that is as easy to read and write as Python
The language is designed in a manner that seems logical. Syntax is simplified to reduce burden on the programmer and compiler developers.
Pro Great team working behind it
Go has a solid team of engineers working on it (some of the best networking engineers in the world are working on Go). Up until now, the great engineering of the language has compensated for its lack of power.
Pro Easy to install and configure; simple to compile software
Go software can be immediately installed, regardless of your operating system, package manager, or processor architecture with the go get command. Software is compiled statically by default so there is no need to worry about software dependencies on the client system. Makefiles and headers are no longer necessary, as the package system automatically resolves dependencies, downloads source code and compiles via a single command: go build
.
Pro Programmers don't have to argue over what 10% subet of the language to implement in their software project
The language promotes programming in a specific idiomatic style, which helps keep every programmer on the same page.
Pro Supports 'modules' in the form of packages
Every Go source file contains a package line that indicates which package a file belongs to. If the name of the package is 'main', it indicates that this is a program that will be compiled into a binary. Otherwise, it will recognize that it is a package.
Pro Demonstrates a unique, simple concept to object-oriented programming
All types are essentially objects, be they type aliases or structs. The compiler automatically associates types to their methods at compile time. Those methods are automatically associated to all interfaces that match. This allows you to gain the benefits of multiple inheritance without glue code. As a result of the design, classes are rendered obsolete and the resulting style is easy to comprehend.
Pro Great language for building networking services
Go was started as a systems language but now it has fully committed in the niche of networking services. This has been a brilliant move by Go because it allows them to capitalize on the immense talent of the Go engineering team (who are in the most part network engineers).
In a world dominated by Java EE and slow scripting language, Go was a breath of fresh air and it continues to be one of the most powerful languages if you want to build networking services.
Pro Exceptionally simple and scalable multithreaded and concurrent programming
Goroutines are "lightweight threads" that runs on OS threads. They provide a simple way for concurrent operations — prepending a function with go
will execute it concurrently. It utilizes channels for communication between goroutines which aids to prevent races and makes synchronizing execution effortless across goroutines. The maximum number of OS threads goroutines can run on may be defined at compile time with the GOMAXPROCS
variable.
Pro The go compiler compiles binaries instantly — as fast as a scripting language interpreter
Compiled binaries are fast — about as fast in C in most cases. Compiles on every OS without effort — truly cross-platform compiler. As a result of the fast compilation speed, you can use the gorun program to use go source code as if it was a scripting language.
Pro Performance is on the order of C and Java
Go is blazing fast, but easier to write than Python, JS, Ruby, or many other dynamic languages.
Pro Jobs available
You can find a Job knowing Go. Which is more than can be said with many other languages.
Pro API documentation is rich in content; easy to memorize
Only features deemed critical are added to the language to prevent cruft from working its way into the language. The language is small enough to fit inside one's head without having to repeatedly open documentation. Documentation is hosted on an official webpage in a manner that is simple to read and understand.
Pro Supports functional programming techniques such as function literals
This naturally also supports first class and high order functions, so you may pass functions as variables to other functions.
Pro Multiple variables may be assigned on a single line
This conveniently eliminates the need to create temporary variables.
Fibonacci example: x, y = y, x+y
Pro Built-in unit testing
The idiomatic approach to writing a Go software project is to perform test-driven development with unit testing. Every source code file should have an associated *_test.go
file which tests functions in the code.
Pro Provides tools for automatically formatting code for your entire software project
This helps keep every programmer on the same page in a project and eliminates arguments over formatting styles.
Pro Automatically generates API documentation for installed packages
Godoc is provided to automatically generate API documentation for Go projects. Godoc also hosts its own self-contained web server that will list documentation for all installed packages in your Go path.
Pro Supports splitting source code into multiple files
As long as every source code file in a directory has the same package name, the compiler will automatically concatenate all of the files together during the compilation process.
Pro Syntax for exported code from a package is simplified to be less verbose than other languages
Any variable, type and function whose name begins with a capital letter will be exported by a project, while all other code remains private. There is no longer a need to signify that a piece of code is 'private' or 'public' manually.
Pro Developing a simple prototype can be very fast
Django's philosophy of batteries included means that experienced developers won't have to plan too much ahead on what kind of application infrastructure they need and instead just start developing web applications quickly.
Pro ORM support out of the box
Django supports Object-Relational Mapping. With models defined as Python classes which are actually subclasses of Django's django.db.models.Model
.
Each attribute of the model is then represented as a database field. Queries are lazily executed and Django gives developers an automatically-generated database-access API.
Pro Top notch documentation and help from community
The official Django documentation is probably some of the best around. Well written, thorough and they explain every little detail of the framework. Django is also a very popular tool, with an extensive community and a lot of experienced developers that have been using it for years. This means that there are a lot of guides and tutorials out there for new and experienced developers alike.
Pro Highly customizable
Django is in itself a highly customizable web framework. The database, template framework and ORM can all be swapped out.
Pro Has an admin panel out of the box
Django comes with a highly customizable admin panel and authentication out of the box. This makes the development and production of a simple CMS extremely easy.
Pro Mature software with many plugins developed over the years
Django was first released in 2005, it has had a lot of time to mature and become better with each release. It also has by far the largest community out of all python frameworks who have continuously over the years built and maintained many powerful plugins.
Pro Clear and defined MVC organization
Django follows some pretty well established MVC patterns. With everything in place and where requests follow a clear path through urlresolvers, middleware, view and context processors.
Pro Simple database management
Just a few lines of code can instruct Django to create all the tables and fields required in your database automatically. Schemas are managed with "migrations", that are also created automatically, and can be rolled out from your development box and implemented on production systems with just a single command.
This performs any database changes required, from table creation, indexes, renaming fields, and pre-populating initial data. Each migration builds on the previous migrations, so you can trace the evolution of your data and even recreate the layout of your database at any point in the lifecycle of your application.
Cons
Con Golang controlled by Google
Solves Google problems, which might not be your or the majority of user's problems. Was created for the benefit and purposes of Google, so is less flexible in language direction and options.
Con Hard to abstract even the simplest notions
Go is famously regarded as very simple. However, this simplicity becomes problematic in time. Programmers who use Go find themselves over and over again writing the same thing from a very low point of view. Domains not already served by libraries that are easy to glue are very difficult to get into.
Con Forces K&R style and won't allow Allman style
Golang developers were extremely short-sighted and biased by forcing the K&R style, which should never have happened. Basically kicking Allman style users out of their language.
Con Doesn't have true enums
Golang does weirdness with const versus having real enums, like other languages. This reflects the stubbornness and shortsightedness of the core developers, similar to the issue with generics, where it was denied that it was needed until it became too obvious that it should have been added years ago.
Con Does not have sum types
Makes it harder to have functions of different parameters types in a non OOP language. Thus messy generics and interfaces, and more confusion, where sum types could have solved a number of issues.
Con It appears Google uses position to snuff out or suppress other languages
Newer languages that could threaten Golang (or other Google controlled languages) appear to have suppressed search results on Google and YouTube. Dangerous situation where large company can manipulate user choice and market share. The freedom to freely choose and user rights need to be protected.
Con Designed to make the programmer expendable
Go was designed for large team projects where many contributors may be incompetent. That Go can still get things done under these conditions is a testament to its utility in this niche. Go's infamously weak abstraction power is thus a feature, not a bug, meant to prevent your teammates from doing too much damage. This also means any team member can be easily replaced by another code monkey at minimum cost. Good for the company, bad for you. The more talented programmers, on the other hand, will be very frustrated by having one hand tied behind their back.
Con Easy to shadow variable
Due to single character only difference, declare and assign statement can easily shadow variable from outer scope unconsciously. Example:
err := nil
if xxx {
err := somefunctionthatreturnsanerr
}
return err // always return nil
Con No forms designer
Those who are used to Visual Studio can feel the lack of a forms designer for rapid development.
Con Bizarre syntactic choices like a unique date format.
Con Changing visibility requires renaming all over the code
Con Lacks support for immutable data
Only way to prevent something from being mutated is to make copies of it, and to be very careful to not mutate it.
Con Performance slowdown because of indirect calls and garbage collection
Practically no meaningful Go application can be written without indirect function calls and garbage collection, these are central to Go's core infrastructure. But these are major impediments to achieving good performance.
Con Implementation of interfaces are difficult to figure out
Finding out what interfaces are implemented by a struct requires a magic crystal ball. They are easy to write, but difficult to read and trawl through.
Con Can feel bloated for small projects
Django's sheer scale and functionality can feel clunky and bloated for small applications. It has too many bells and whistles which can get in the way when developing a small scale application.
Con The documentation does not cover real-world scenarios
It is a larger documentation indeed, however is not deep and covers non real problems or even don't show any examples. You'll be better with Google or Stackoverflow
Con Routing requires some knowledge of regular expressions
Given a GET request for /topics/426/viewpoints/1/sections/create
, how does Django decide which bit of Python code is invoked to handle it?
It compares the request path to your giant pile of regular expressions.
And then if there's some other regular expression starts matching /top
and all your requests for /topics/
start going there, good luck figuring out why. You won't be informed of any conflict until you notice you seem to be getting the wrong pages back.
The structure of URL paths is almost universally hierarchal. There is no call to have anything as ridiculously flexible (and notoriously hard-to-read) as regular expressions to organize request routing.
Con Template errors fail silently by default
If you make a typo in a template variable, or change a view so that variable is no longer passed to the template, you won't get an error message pointing out that something has gone wrong. That reference will just be treated as if it is an empty string instead.
There is a way to configure this, but since so many templates have been written assuming this behavior, nobody ever enables template errors because it would break so much of the existing support tools (e.g. the built-in admin interface).