Ah, Golang (or Go, if you’re feeling lazy). It’s been over a decade since we decided to make the jump from the comfort zones of PHP and Java to the brave new world of Go. Now, PHP was that cozy old sweater you’ve had forever, and Java, well, Java was that serious business suit you never quite felt comfortable in but wore because everyone else was doing it. So, what made us swap them out for the sleek, minimalistic turtleneck that is Golang? Grab a coffee ☕️, and let me walk you through this delightful rollercoaster of a journey!

The Big Leap: Why Golang?

In the early 2010s, like many others, we were dealing with clunky Java codebases and PHP’s “let’s hope it works in production” philosophy. Then, Golang appeared on the horizon, with its promises of simplicity, performance, and concurrency magic. Go felt like a breath of fresh air: minimal boilerplate, built-in concurrency through goroutines (yes, goroutines!), and that sweet, sweet compile-time safety.

We were hooked. 🎣

PHP vs Go: The Breakup

PHP was…fine (we’re being polite here). But after years of wrestling with slow performance and hacky workarounds, we found ourselves wishing for something more. PHP wasn’t cutting it anymore, especially when it came to scaling up for modern, high-performance applications. Go’s fast compilation, static typing, and native concurrency were game changers. It was like upgrading from a clunky bicycle 🚲 to a rocket ship 🚀.

Java vs Go: The Long Goodbye

Now, Java. Java was robust, sure. But boy, did it have baggage! Ever tried deploying a massive Java app? It’s like trying to move a herd of elephants 🐘. Sure, they get there, but slowly. Go, on the other hand, was lightweight, fast, and portable. Plus, Goroutines made handling concurrent tasks feel like child’s play. Java’s threads? They felt like… pulling teeth 🦷. Ouch.

The First Golang Love Child: smtpd 📬

After making the switch, our first big Golang project was smtpd, a lightweight, high-performance SMTP server made for receiving large volumes of mail and storing them in MongoDB. It wasn’t flashy, but it did the job efficiently, and most importantly, fast. smtpd was designed to grab emails, dump them in the database, and disconnect ASAP – a clean-cut job, no fuss, no muss.

What smtpd doesn’t do:

• No spam checking 🛑
• No sender verification ❌
• No email sending 🚫

Think of it like a mailman 📨 who just drops the mail and leaves – no chit-chat, no lingering. Spam? That’s someone else’s problem. SMTP relaying? Nope, not here. smtpd was created to do one thing and do it well—process incoming mail and get out of the way. Efficient, just like Golang itself.

Why We Fell in Love With Golang ❤️

It wasn’t just the speed that won us over (though that was huge). It was the simplicity, the ease of deployment, and the joy of working with Go’s goroutines.

Goroutines: The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread 🍞

Concurrency is hard. Java threads were like stubborn teenagers – difficult to manage and prone to rebellion. Goroutines? They’re like well-behaved puppies 🐶. You tell them to fetch, they fetch. You want thousands of concurrent tasks? Easy peasy. You want memory-efficient parallelism? Done.

Go’s concurrency model made us feel like wizards 🧙‍♂️. We could suddenly handle massive amounts of data, process thousands of requests simultaneously, and never break a sweat.

Go: The Deployment Dream 💭

Building and deploying in Go? A dream. A compiled language that gave us a single, small binary that we could deploy anywhere. It’s like that old Ron Popeil infomercial: “Set it and forget it!” 🔧 No JVM to set up, no weird runtime dependencies. Just build, ship, and run. The end.

Golang for the Win 🏆

A decade in, and we still love working with Go. It’s made us faster, more efficient, and honestly, a lot happier as developers. Whether we’re building high-performance services like smtpd or designing new tools to scale our infrastructure, Go has been our trusty sidekick through it all.

So, if you’re still stuck in PHP or Java land, we feel you. We were there. But trust us: once you go Go, you never go back.

Ready to join the Go revolution? 💪 Give our smtpd repo a look and see what this language can do for you!

Happy coding! 😎