Talking Tech In Detroit: Building Platform Architecture With Golang

In this new series, Benzinga will look inward and focus on some of the technology that our developers in Detroit use to bring actionable news to traders and investors before anyone else.

In our last post, we explored the React framework’s role in creating Benzinga Pro with Bert David, Benzinga’s head of product development.

This installment features Detroit-based Golang developer John Chadwick as he explains the Golang backend infrastructure of Benzinga Pro.

Responsive Application

Many of us struggle with slow computer processing speeds, and all we’re trying to do half the time is just browse Facebook Inc FB and clear our inboxes.

But, since Benzinga’s Detroit development team has created a browser-based newswire and made it lightning-fast, they need to work with a next-level set of backend tools to keep it that way. The programming language Go, also known as Golang, allows Benzinga’s developers to implement a responsive application. Benzinga is always looking to add more Detroit-based Golang engineers to its team.

“We use Golang in the backend as part of our microservice-based infrastructure,” explains Benzinga developer John Chadwick. “Go runs the core of Benzinga Pro and our licensing software through Benzinga’s proprietary content system. Go speeds up the delivery of data to our licensing and Pro clients, meaning it helps traders and investors get quality information faster.”

Related Link: Talking Tech In Detroit: Working With React To Create A High-Speed News Platform

What Is Go?

Go is a programming language developed by Google engineer Rob Pike, one of the original architects of the Unix OS, as well as Robert Griesemer and Ken Thompson, who invented the C programming language. Developers creating low-latency systems favor Golang because it streamlines development and promotes robust error handling.

“Go excels because it takes an older style of programming and makes it significantly more accessible,” said Chadwick. “It solves problems that plague C developers such as dependency hell, and makes everything generally faster.”

When errors occur, Golang specifically tells engineers by delivering an “error” result. In many programming languages, error handling is inconsistent, and often, how an error should be handled in a given segment of code is unclear. Go is more explicit in its error handling, which allows programmers to quickly identify the source of a problem in the codebase.

“We want our services to be robust and highly available, and in order to achieve that, we need our programming language and tools to work together to ensure that we can handle it properly when something goes wrong,” said Chadwick. “Go does a superb job of letting us know when an error occurs, and how we handle it is always well-defined, so we know what’s going to happen when something doesn’t work.”

There’s great value in working in open-source programming languages, according to Chadwick. A wide range of developers can tinker with easily accessible languages, expanding their capabilities.

“One of the major benefits of open-source languages is that they bring in the entire developer community to add their use cases and ideas to the project,” said Chadwick. “Over time, open-source software becomes very robust. Go is moving at a pace that’s unimaginable for most software projects.”

Evolving

Moving forward, the Benzinga developer team is transitioning more systems to Go from a Drupal backend.

“It’s hard to overstate exactly how much faster Golang would be than a lot of contemporarily popular languages like Python,” Chadwick said.

If you’re a developer interested in working in Go, you can learn more on the project’s official page here. A comparison of Node and Go is available here.

Benzinga’s Detroit engineering team is always looking for passionate new members who are eager to challenge the biggest players in the finance space. For more information, check out the postings on Benzinga’s careers page.