From PHP to Go after one year: honest assessment
Was a PHP developer for 6 years. Switched to Go 14 months ago for a new job. Writing down my assessment since I see this question asked monthly.
Go is a smaller language than PHP by design. The standard library covers most of what Composer packages cover in PHP. The explicit error handling gets old but the code is easier to follow because control flow is obvious.
The concurrency model is genuinely better for high-throughput services. Goroutines are lighter than PHP coroutines and the channel pattern is cleaner than shared-memory async. If performance is the main reason for switching, it pays off.
The ecosystem is smaller. For web apps specifically, there is no equivalent to Laravel or Symfony in Go. You are assembling from smaller components. More decisions, more code to write for common patterns.
The job market for Go pays better but there are fewer Go jobs than PHP jobs. The trade-off is higher ceiling, smaller pool.
Did you miss anything from PHP specifically? Or was it mostly the framework ecosystem you missed?
Honestly, I miss Eloquent. Go ORMs are either thin (sqlx) or trying too hard (GORM has its own quirks). The query builder pattern in PHP is mature in a way Go is not yet.
PHP is not going anywhere for web development. Go makes sense if the role calls for it. Switching for the sake of switching is a cost with unclear benefit.
```php blocks are runnable.