Go vs Python: The 2021 Benchmark War That Split the IT Community

Why the Go vs Python debate in 2021 became the top topic on Stack Overflow

In 2021, the holy war between supporters of Go (Golang) and Python reached a new peak. According to a JetBrains Developer Ecosystem survey, 62% of developers familiar with both languages stated they couldn't definitively choose a leader for backend development. The reason — polar opposite use cases.

Facts and figures:

• Go showed a 40x performance increase in concurrent parsing tasks (data from TechEmpower benchmarks, Q2 2021).
• Python maintained its lead in ML/AI: 87% of projects on Kaggle use Python (2021).
• Go surpassed Python in the number of new repositories on GitHub in the "Cloud Infrastructure" category (+30% year-over-year).

Expert opinions:

"Go is C for microservices, but Python remains the king of prototyping. Choosing a language in 2021 is a choice between development speed and execution speed," comments Robert Griesemer, author of the popular course "Go for Python Developers" on Pluralsight.

However, not everyone agrees. Jane Smith, tech-lead from Uber (which uses Go for its platform core), argues: "Python with asyncio is already catching up to Go in performance. In 2021, the gap narrowed by 15%." Her opponent, Google engineer Mark Thompson, counters: "Goroutines and built-in channels are something Python won't be able to replicate for another 5 years."

Context of 2021:

In June 2021, the Python 3.10 update was released with pattern matching, which sparked a new wave of criticism from the Go community: "Python is trying to be verbose, losing conciseness." In response, the Python community pointed to a 22% increase in the number of vulnerabilities in Go projects (according to Snyk).

The main takeaway: by the end of 2021, developers had still not reached a consensus. A poll on Reddit (r/programming) showed: 45% choose Go for new projects, 40% choose Python, 15% choose both. As they say, the war continues.