In this blog, we'll be comparing two popular options to create web applications: Django and Golang. We'll take a closer look at the key features, use cases, and advantages and disadvantages of each so that you can make a decision about which one is the best fit for your next project.
Django vs Go - Quick Comparison
Technology
Django
Golang
Developed By
Lawrence Journal-World
Google
Release Year
2005
2009
Written In
Python
C and Assembly language
Technology Type
Backend Framework
Server-side
Learning Curve
Moderate
Moderate
Best Suited for
Web applications
Distributed Systems, Network Systems
App Structure
Model-View-Template
Flexible
Dependency Injection
Not supported
Supported
Performance
Moderate
High
Popular Apps
Instagram, Spotify
Docker, Kubernetes
Price
Free, Open-Source
Free and open-source
About Django and Go
What is Django?
Django is an open-source Python web framework used to build web applications. Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison created it in 2003 and was released in 2005. Django simplifies the creation of web pages in Python. It follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern. This separates the data model, user interface, and control logic, and makes the development process easier.
Python is a high-level programming language that is beginner-friendly and easy to learn. This makes Django a popular choice for developing web applications as it further eases development using Python. It eases the development faster with less code, testing and maintenance of the codebase.
Django's scalability and flexibility enable it to manage web applications of all sizes and complexities. This makes it a favourite choice for renowned websites like Instagram, Pinterest, and Mozilla. Many other firms also hire Django developers The community of Django developers is not only large but also engaging, regularly contributing to the framework's improvement while offering support to fellow developers.
What is Go?
Go (also known as Golang) is an open-source and statically typed programming language designed by Google. It was publicly announced in 2009 but its version 1.0 was later released in 2012. Developers use Golang to develop web applications, cloud and networking services, and other types of software.
Golang prioritizes simplicity, efficiency, and performance, and has gained popularity for its powerful concurrency model and garbage collector. The popularity of Go as a language for writing microservices and other applications can be attributed to its fast startup time, low runtime overhead, and ability to run without the need for a virtual machine (VM).
Golang was specifically created to address various issues, such as slow build time, unregulated dependencies, redundant efforts, challenges in developing automatic tools, and difficulties in cross-language development.
Golang's syntax is straightforward and easy to read, similar to C but with modern language features such as slices, maps, and interfaces. It also prioritizes code readability and maintainability, providing built-in documentation and formatting tools.
As a result, Golang is well-suited for a wide range of applications, from web servers to large-scale distributed systems. Its simplicity and ease of use have made it popular among developers who value productivity and performance and many firms look to hire Golang developers.
Key Features
Django - Key Features
Django has gained immense popularity in recent years due to these features that make it a perfect choice for developing web applications:
Rapid Development: Django facilitates quick development. It enables developers to create fully functional websites without a prior understanding of the backend. It handles a lot of tasks for us. This saves developers time and money, allowing them to focus more on designing other website features.
MVC Architecture: Django follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture which separates the data model, user interface, and control logic. This makes it easier for developers to write clean and reusable code.
Security: Security is given a lot of importance. Django has standard encryption packages in the framework to protect websites. Additionally, Django's architecture helps prevent common security threats, such as SQL vulnerabilities, Clickjacking, and cross-site scripting.
Scalability: Django can handle a large amount of traffic, and is built to work on scale. Tools such as load balancers and caching tools help in achieving it.
Object-Relational Mapping: Django's ORM allows developers to work with databases using Python objects, without writing SQL queries. This makes it easier to work with databases. ORM also helps in reducing the risk of SQL injection attacks.
Templating Engine: Django's templating engine allows developers to create dynamic web pages by defining templates and filling them with data, which makes it easier to create consistent and maintainable user interfaces.
Packages: Django provides various packages for creating a fully functional application. It has packages for creating APIs, cross-origin site response requests, debugging, and authentication. Developers can use these packages as per their needs.
Go - Key Features
Simplicity: Go prioritizes readability and maintainability over being feature-rich, with only relevant features added to avoid unnecessary complexity. Go's simplicity and clarity make it a highly effective language for developing software, even in large codebases written by others.
Powerful standard library: Go has a comprehensive standard library that provides developers with a wide range of components, eliminating the need for third-party packages. Additionally, Go offers a variety of tools that streamline the development process and make it more efficient.
Garbage collection: Automatic garbage collection is a key feature of Go, enabling efficient memory management and reducing the likelihood of common memory management errors.
Built-in testing support: Go includes a simple and effective testing framework that allows developers to test their packages using the "go test" command. Developers have the ability to write unit tests alongside their application code. Additionally, Go provides support for code coverage analysis, benchmark testing, and the creation of example code to facilitate code documentation.
Concurrency support: Concurrency is essential for effectively utilizing multi-processor architecture, and it enables large applications to scale more efficiently. One of the unique advantages of Golang is its simpler and more trackable approach to concurrency compared to other programming languages. This allows app developers to process requests more quickly, free up allocated resources and network earlier, and achieve other performance benefits.
Statically typed: Go's static typing and compilation mechanism ensure accurate code compilation, while also handling type conversions and compatibility.
Speed of compilation: Go's fast compilation times make it easy for developers to iterate and test their code quickly. Compared to other popular programming languages such as Python and Java, Go features significantly faster compilation and execution speeds.
Cross-platform: Go is a cross-platform programming language that enables developers to write code that can be compiled to run on multiple operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux.
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Performance Comparison
Django Performance
Django has become one of the most used frameworks for web applications in the past few years due to its versatility and performance. Although performance has been a matter of concern, there have been many developments to enhance it.
When it comes to performance, Django is considered to be a highly scalable framework that can handle large amounts of traffic. Django has a built-in Object Relational Mapping (ORM) system that allows it to handle database queries efficiently. This allows developers to work with databases more efficiently. This leads to a faster query time and better overall performance.
Django has a caching framework that can significantly reduce server load and increase response times. This works by storing frequently accessed data in memory which is faster than retrieving it from the database. Also, Django can utilize a CDN to serve static files and with this feature, the static files are distributed across multiple servers. It enhances performance by reducing the load on a single server.
Another feature that contributes to Django's performance is its ability to handle multiple requests simultaneously. This is achieved through the use of a WSGI (Web Server Gateway Interface) server such as Gunicorn or uWSGI. These servers can handle multiple requests at once and improve overall throughput.
Go Performance
Golang is widely recognized for its high performance, with speed and smoothness being two of its main characteristics. This can be attributed to several factors, including Golang's compiled nature and efficient memory management. Because Golang is a compiled language, it can execute code more quickly than interpreted languages like Python. Additionally, Golang's garbage collection and memory allocation are optimized to be efficient, which helps to reduce memory overhead and improve performance.
Another factor that contributes to Go's performance is its concurrency feature. Go makes it easy to write concurrent programs, allowing developers to take advantage of multi-core CPUs and handle large volumes of data with ease. With Go's concurrency primitives, developers can write code that is both efficient and easy to read, enabling smooth and predictable performance.
Overall, Go's simple syntax, robust standard library, and efficient memory management and concurrency features make it an ideal choice for building high-performance applications. Its performance, speed, and smoothness make it a popular choice among developers for building complex and scalable systems.
Popularity over the years
Django
Django is one of the most popular web development frameworks in use today. Since its initial release in 2005, it has grown in popularity, due to its various features. The ease of use, robust features, and active community of developers has made it one of the most preferred frameworks.
The GitHub repository of Django has more than 70K stars which speaks of the popularity it has amongst developers. According to the Stack Overflow development survey in 2022, more than 14 percent of the respondents voted that they use Django in their projects. The framework is expected to grow as more and more features are added to improve performance!
Go
Golang was first introduced by Google in 2009 and has since become increasingly popular. Its popularity can be attributed to several factors, including its high performance, concurrency, and ease of use.
In the early years after its release, Golang gained a small but dedicated following, particularly among developers in the open-source community. However, it wasn't until 2016 that Golang really began to gain widespread popularity, thanks to the release of version 1.6, which included significant improvements in terms of garbage collection and support for HTTP/2.
Since then, Golang has continued to grow in popularity, with more and more developers adopting it as their language of choice for building high-performance systems. According to the TIOBE Index, which ranks programming languages based on their popularity, Golang has consistently been ranked among the top 20 languages since 2017, and it currently sits at number 11 as of April 2023.
The rise of cloud computing and the need for fast and efficient back-end development has also contributed to Golang's popularity. Its simple syntax, built-in concurrency support, and efficient memory management make it well-suited for building microservices and other cloud-based applications.
Overall, Golang's popularity is expected to continue to grow as more developers become familiar with its benefits and more organizations adopt it for their development needs.
Advantages and Disadvantages
Advantages of Django
Versatile: Due to its various features, Django finds its use cases in many domains and that makes it versatile. Some of the use cases include building web applications, content management systems, e-commerce sites, and many more.
Great documentation: Django has comprehensive documentation that covers almost all features of the framework. This makes it easier for developers to get started with and use.
Faster development: Django ensures rapid development with the vast libraries and packages it possesses. With less code, you get the desired result, ensuring code reusability.
Suitable for SEO: In Django, developers can benefit from several SEO tools. The Django SEO framework is a module available in Django, that helps in reducing the page loading time.
Open Source: Django is an open-source and free-to-use framework that has a large and active community of developers who contribute to its development and provide support.
Disadvantages of Django
Complexity: Django is a full-stack framework with a lot of functionality. This makes it more complicated than other frameworks. This complexity might make learning and understanding challenging for developers at times.
Slow Startup Time: Django has a relatively slow startup time compared to other frameworks. This can make it difficult to use for small projects or projects with a short timeline.
Advantages of Go
Faster execution: Golang has the advantage of compiling directly to machine code, without the need for an interpreter, resulting in faster development. Programs written in Golang are highly efficient and compile quickly, making it a preferred choice among developers for faster back-end development.
Easy to learn: Golang has a simple and concise syntax, making it easy to learn and use, even for developers who are new to the language. Its code structure is similar to that of C, making it easy for programmers with experience in other languages to pick up.
Active Developer community: The strong and active Golang developer community ensures that support is readily available for any issues that may arise during the development process. Golang has a large and growing community of developers, making it easy to find support, documentation, and third-party libraries and tools.
Efficient memory management: Golang uses a garbage collector that automatically frees up memory that is no longer needed, preventing memory leaks and reducing the risk of crashes due to running out of memory. This feature makes Golang a good choice for building large-scale, high-performance systems that require efficient memory management.
Scalability: Golang is designed to scale easily, making it a good choice for building large, complex systems that need to handle a high volume of traffic.
Disadvantages of Go
Doesn’t support generic functions: Generic functions are functions with the same name that can handle inputs of undefined types during compile time. In the absence of support for generic functions, programmers have to create multiple versions of functions to handle different types of parameters.
Golang does not have built-in support for generics, which can make it harder to write reusable and flexible code.
Immature ecosystem: Although Golang has been around for several years, its ecosystem is still relatively young compared to other languages, resulting in a smaller community and fewer resources.
Limited support for GUI applications: Although Golang has been around for several years, its ecosystem is still relatively young compared to other languages, resulting in a smaller community and fewer resources.
Limited libraries: Compared to other programming languages like Java and Python, Golang has a limited set of libraries and tools, which can make it more challenging to find the right tool for a specific task.
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Use Cases
Django - Use Cases
Django has gained immense popularity in recent years due to these features that make it a perfect choice for developing web applications:
Rapid Development: Django facilitates quick development. It enables developers to create fully functional websites without a prior understanding of the backend. It handles a lot of tasks for us. This saves developers time and money, allowing them to focus more on designing other website features.
MVC Architecture: Django follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture which separates the data model, user interface, and control logic. This makes it easier for developers to write clean and reusable code.
Security: Security is given a lot of importance. Django has standard encryption packages in the framework to protect websites. Additionally, Django's architecture helps prevent common security threats, such as SQL vulnerabilities, Clickjacking, and cross-site scripting.
Scalability: Django can handle a large amount of traffic, and is built to work on scale. Tools such as load balancers and caching tools help in achieving it.
Object-Relational Mapping: Django's ORM allows developers to work with databases using Python objects, without writing SQL queries. This makes it easier to work with databases. ORM also helps in reducing the risk of SQL injection attacks.
Templating Engine: Django's templating engine allows developers to create dynamic web pages by defining templates and filling them with data, which makes it easier to create consistent and maintainable user interfaces.
Packages: Django provides various packages for creating a fully functional application. It has packages for creating APIs, cross-origin site response requests, debugging, and authentication. Developers can use these packages as per their needs.
Go - Use Cases
Simplicity: Go prioritizes readability and maintainability over being feature-rich, with only relevant features added to avoid unnecessary complexity. Go's simplicity and clarity make it a highly effective language for developing software, even in large codebases written by others.
Powerful standard library: Go has a comprehensive standard library that provides developers with a wide range of components, eliminating the need for third-party packages. Additionally, Go offers a variety of tools that streamline the development process and make it more efficient.
Garbage collection: Automatic garbage collection is a key feature of Go, enabling efficient memory management and reducing the likelihood of common memory management errors.
Built-in testing support: Go includes a simple and effective testing framework that allows developers to test their packages using the "go test" command. Developers have the ability to write unit tests alongside their application code. Additionally, Go provides support for code coverage analysis, benchmark testing, and the creation of example code to facilitate code documentation.
Concurrency support: Concurrency is essential for effectively utilizing multi-processor architecture, and it enables large applications to scale more efficiently. One of the unique advantages of Golang is its simpler and more trackable approach to concurrency compared to other programming languages. This allows app developers to process requests more quickly, free up allocated resources and network earlier, and achieve other performance benefits.
Statically typed: Go's static typing and compilation mechanism ensure accurate code compilation, while also handling type conversions and compatibility.
Speed of compilation: Go's fast compilation times make it easy for developers to iterate and test their code quickly. Compared to other popular programming languages such as Python and Java, Go features significantly faster compilation and execution speeds.
Cross-platform: Go is a cross-platform programming language that enables developers to write code that can be compiled to run on multiple operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Which is better - Django or Go
After comparing Django and Golang, it's clear that each technology has its own strengths and weaknesses. The choice between the two boils down to what are the requirements of the project.
Django is a great choice for web development when working with Python-based projects, especially if your project requires rapid development and high-level abstractions. On the other hand, Golang is a great choice for those who prioritize performance, and scalability, especially for building large-scale distributed systems.
If you're building a complex, data-driven web application, Django is the better choice. If you're building a large-scale distributed system that requires high performance and scalability, then Golang is a great choice.
