The 11 Best Go Interview Questions in 2023
What are the best Golang (Go) interview questions? If you’re hiring your next Go developer, you need the best Golang interview questions.
Want to learn more? Read on!
Interviewing Golang developers
What is Go? Go is an open-source and statically typed and compiled programming language that is syntactically similar to C. However, the difference is memory safety, garbage collection, CSP-style concurrency, and structural typing.
To vet your candidates, you’ll want to know how well they understand Go.
However, your requirements will depend on whether you’re hiring a junior or a senior developer. And here below, we’ll first look at the best Go interview questions for junior developers, followed by interview questions for senior Go developers.
Beginner Golang developer interview questions
What are the top Go junior developer interview questions? Here are our top picks.
1. What is Golang?
Answer:
Go is an open-source, high-level and general-purpose language. It was originally invented by Google employees to focus on simplicity and quick performance. It was built for networking and infrastructure programs and the intention was to replace popular high-performance server-side languages like Java and C++. Today, Go is also used for various cloud-based and server-side applications, DevOps and site reliability automation, command-line tools, and AI and data science.
Go is strongly and statically typed to support garbage collection and concurrent programming. The language is built with packages that help manage dependencies efficiently and its syntax structures are easy to understand. It also includes powerful standard libraries so that developers can solve problems without having to rely on third-party packages.
2. What are the benefits of Go?
Answer:
Simple to use: Go is pragmatically designed and every feature is meant to make it easier for programmers to do their work.
Scalable: Go supports concurrency by taking advantage of efficient memory management strategies and multi-core processor architecture for implementing concurrency.
Readable: Go has a standard code format and is therefore considered more readable than other languages.
Efficient: Go is more efficient than Java or Python thanks to its automatic garbage collection.
3. What are Go packages?
Answer:
Go packages (or pkg) are directions that include Go source files or other Go packages. Every piece of code (from variables to functions) in the source file is stored in a linked package.
4. What is the Go workplace?
Answer:
The Golang workplace contains Go code and is a directory hierarchy and has three directories at its roots. These are:
Src - contains source files, which are organized into packages
Pkg - contains package objects that are stored in the directory
Bin - contains executable commands
5. Explain what data types Go uses?
Answer:
Golang uses the following types:
Struct
Pointer
Method
Boolean
Numeric
String
Array
Map
Channel
Slice
Function
Interface
6. Explain concurrency in Go?
Answer:
In general, large programs are made of smaller sub-programs. But Go enables you to run smaller components of each of these programs at the same time thanks to concurrency thanks to goroutines and channels.
Senior Golang interview questions
What are the top senior Go interview questions? Here are our top interview question picks for advanced developers.
7. List the decision-making statements in Go?
Answer:
There are four decision-making statements in Go. These are:
If: The most simple decision-making statement. It’s used to decide if a condition is true so that a statement or a block of statements will be executed or not.
If-else: This decision-making statement is used to determine if a block of code should be executed even if the condition is false.
Nested-if: A nested if is target of another if or else, so a nested if statement is an if statement within if statements.
If-else-if: A user can decide between many options. The statements are executed from the top down and when one of the conditions controlling the if is true, the statement is executed and the rest of the ladder is skipped over. However, if none of the conditions are true, the final else statement is executed.
8. How do you test with Go?
Answer:
Go enables automated testing of packages with custom testing suites. Create a file that ends with _test.go and includes a TestXxx function in order to create a suite. Xxx is replaced with the name of the feature you want to test. Then, place the testing suite file in the same package as the file you want to test. During regular execution, the test file will be skipped but it will run when you enter the go test command.
9. Are both GOPATH and GOROOT variables necessary?
Answer:
No, you don’t need both of them most of the time. Only GOPATH needs to be pointing to the Go packages tree or trees. GOROOT should point to the root of the Go language home directory. GOROOT should be set if there are many Go language versions on the same system or if Go was downloaded as a binary package or transferred from another system.
10. How do you concatenate string values?
Answer:
You need to use the addition operator (+) to concatenate strings. But each time a string is concatenated to a string value, Go creates a new string, which makes this inefficient as strings are immutable in Go. To concatenate string values efficiently, use the strings.Builder type.
11. What is the difference between array and slice types?
Answer:
Arrays and slices are the data structures in Go that handle lists of records. Slices are a key data type and have a dynamic length. Arrays, on the other hand, are a composite and indexable type that stores a collection of elements. They have a fixed length and the number of items in them is specified when it’s declared. Every element in a slice or array must be the same type.
Over to you!
There you have it! Now you know what the best Golang interview questions are.
However, interviews are one part of the hiring process. Skill assessments are equally important. And to assess your candidates’ Go skills, you need the right coding testing platform.
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