Go for JVM Engineers

The Mental Model Shift

How Go's structural typing, value semantics, and absence of class hierarchies force a productive rethink for JVM engineers.

Errors as Values

How Go's explicit error returns replace exception hierarchies, and why errors.Is, errors.As, and wrapping make it more powerful than it looks.

Concurrency: Goroutines and Channels

How Go's CSP-based concurrency model compares to JVM threads, why channels beat shared-state synchronisation, and how context cancellation keeps goroutines tidy.

Memory and GC Differences

How Go's garbage collector and escape analysis differ from the JVM's generational GC, and what that means for latency-sensitive services.

Modules and Tooling

How Go modules, workspaces, and the standard toolchain map to Maven and Gradle workflows — and where Go's single-binary build model changes everything.

Web Servers from net/http

How to build production-grade HTTP services using Go's standard library, map Spring MVC patterns to http.ServeMux and middleware, and know when to reach for a router.

Testing the Go Way

How Go's testing package, table-driven tests, and testable examples replace JUnit's annotation model — and why Go tests are simpler than they look.

Profiling

How to use pprof, execution traces, and flamegraphs to find performance bottlenecks in Go services — and how these compare to JFR and async-profiler.

When Go Is Wrong

Honest assessment of where Go's design falls short for JVM engineers: domain modelling gaps, generics limitations, and ecosystem holes you should know before committing.