Golang from a .Net Dev Perspective - Part 1
As a .NET developer with ~10 years of experience in C#, I’ve recently started learning Golang.
At first, Go looks like a very different — no classes, no LINQ, no inheritance, no different kinds of loops. But once you get past the initial culture shock, you start to understand it.
In this series, I’ll break down Go from a .NET developer's point of view — mapping familiar concepts, highlighting differences, and hopefully making the learning curve smoother for others like me.
Why Learn Go as a .NET Developer?
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Simplicity: Go prides itself on being simple, fast to compile, and easy to reason about - still trying to figure it out.
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Concurrency built-in: Goroutines and channels offer elegant concurrency primitives.
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Cross-platform binaries: Compiles into a single executable. No runtime, no dependencies.
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Just for Fun: Learning something new is fun and Go is quite different from what we're used to in the .NET world.
Key Differences
| Concept / Feature | C# (.NET) | Go |
|---|---|---|
| Syntax | Rich syntax with many keywords and constructs (e.g., foreach, async, var, using) |
Minimalist syntax, fewer keywords and constructs |
| Classes & Inheritance | Supports classes, records, structs, inheritance, abstract classes | No classes or inheritance — only structs & interfaces |
| Structs | Value types with optional methods | Core type for composition, commonly used |
| Interfaces | Explicitly implemented | Implicit implementation (duck typing) |
| Generics | Mature and feature-rich | Introduced in Go 1.18, more limited but improving |
| LINQ / Querying | Built-in LINQ support for querying collections | No LINQ — use loops and helper functions |
| Loops | for, foreach, while, do-while |
Only for loop with multiple styles supported |
| Error Handling | Exceptions, try/catch/finally | Error is a value (no exceptions), handled explicitly |
| Access Modifiers | public, private, protected, internal | Exported if capitalized (e.g., Name is public) |
| Async/Await | Built-in support for asynchronous programming | Uses goroutines and channels for concurrency |
| Compilation | Compiles to IL (Intermediate Language) + runtime needed | Compiles to a native static binary |
| Project Structure | Solutions, projects, packages | Packages and modules, single-binary philosophy |
| Package Manager | NuGet | go mod (built-in module system) |
| Reflection | Powerful and widely used | Limited and discouraged for most use cases |
Next
In the next blog, we'll go through the differences.
Cheers 👯♀️