When I started learning Go, a couple of its features had really drawn me towards it. The first was the ease in which pointers could be used. The second was the ease with which its asynchronous capabilities could be used. In this blog, I would try to use the different ways you can solve a very simple problem.

Let us take a very common example where we would simply try to build a program which would check if a set of websites/urls are up and running or not. For this example, I have picked 5 airline websites.

I turned into a Gopher about 10 months ago and have never looked back. Like many other gophers, I quickly found the simple features of the language quite useful to quickly build fast and scalable software. When I was initially picking up Go, I was playing around with different multiplexers available to be used as an API server.

If you are coming from a Rails background like me, you probably would also have struggled in building all the features which one can get from Web Frameworks. Coming back to the multiplexers, I found 3 to be quite useful: Gorilla mux, httprouter and bone (ordered in ascending order of their performance). Even though bone had the best performance and a simpler handler signature, it was not mature enough to be used in a production environment yet. So I ended up using httprouter.