Web scraping has become a vital tool for many businesses nowadays. It allows individuals and companies to collect useful data from websites, process it, and apply it for different goals. Picking the right tools is essential for the effectiveness of that task. Today, Golang and Python language have become some of the best options for web scraping. In this article, we will explore the pros and cons of using Python and Golang language as such tools, comparing their speed, scalability, and suitability in different scenarios.
Features of Python and Go
Web scraping is usually described as the technique that allows extracting various types of data from websites. In this process, extracted data transforms into a structured list for further analysis and use. Required information retrieved from sites via HTTP requests and downloading the HTML content.
Web scraping is widely used in different industries, such as analytics, marketing, finance, and e-commerce. Oftentimes, processes of this kind can benefit from proxies for web scraping. You can use datacenter proxies or residential proxies for making scraping or more effective. More than this, some use cases may require special user agents for web scraping, for block bypassing.
For now, Python language is taking the position as one of the widely used programming languages, while Golang is staying in the top ten. This happens because of the much wider use cases and already existing implementations for Python. The Golang language only craves these opportunities, but with time more and more developers start using it in their projects.
Python language can be described as a powerful and common language that can be used for a big variety of tasks. Its philosophy is overturned by overall simplicity, which has made it accessible to newbies. Code for Python is easily accessible for beginners in coding. Python also boasts a large set of libraries and frameworks supported by its growing community. In case you decide to practice web scraping, Python can provide a lot of instruments like for example Beautiful Soup web scraping, Requests, and Selenium. A set of tools, like this, allow developers to access HTML, produce HTTP requests, and make actions of the browser automatic. But, web scraping is only one of the many use cases for Python. That language can also be applied to data analysis, machine learning, artificial intelligence, web development and more.
Golang language, on the other hand, was developed by Google not this long ago. The main benefits of using Golang will be its scalability and stability. Golang has become a popular tool for web scraping just in recent years. This popularity was boosted by efficient memory management and fast execution that Go can offer. Golang is commonly used in large projects that require more fast processing of data. Go is also known for more sustainability for crashes in the process of web scraping.
Pros of Go vs Python
Both Python and Golang language proved their strengths as mostly universal languages. The pros of Python include its ease of learning and simplicity of use, all while not taking away from its usefulness. More simple syntax can help to focus on the logic process and not be distracted with barriers of language. It’s also important to admit that the Python language was created as an open source and free tool, so there is no barrier for developers to use and experiment with it.
Python collects a large number of libraries and frameworks that are applicable when you scrape or crawl a website. Many of those tools were tailor-made for this purpose. Python is also a fundamental tool for data analysis, machine learning and scientific projects. A key benefit of Python in this context is the ability to execute code from other languages and vice versa.
The main advantages of the Golang language over Python lurks in his scalability, concurrency, and overall performance. Golang was created to be scalable while keeping enough performance. Its use cases can easily contain web scraping projects of any scale. Difference between web crawling and web scraping in case of Goolang also is not an issue. Language can be used for projects in both spheres unlike Python.
One of the main reasons for using Golang language over Python is efficient use of memory for fast and reliable execution. It helps in cases of scraping large amounts of data within a short period of time. Not to forget, concurrency for solving multiple tasks simultaneously, that reinforces all other Golang web scraping abilities. Golang language, unlike Python, also has a built-in HTTP client that makes it easy to make requests and receive data from websites. In overall comparison, both Python and Go can answer a big variety of developers’ needs.
Cons of Go vs Python
There are few things that need to be considered when it comes to the cons of both languages. The main problem that can occur in the process of working with Python is slower execution speed when compared to Go. In large scale Python web scraping projects, it will affect the efficiency and result. Moreover, the garbage collector in Python language can in some cases be a cause of memory leaks. This, in turn, leads to more crashes and the overall program’s slow performance.
On the other hand, Python is still more friendly to new users and requires less effort for achieving results. Golang web scraping can be really hard to deploy for new learners, since it does not have built-in support for data parsing HTML and XML types of documents. But, work with these documents can also have parsing errors in Python. In Goolang you can overcome this problem by using libraries like Goquery. Ultimately, the choice between web scraping with Python or Golang language depends on the specific requirements of the project.
Golang provides an advantage in case of speed and memory management compared to other languages. Although the Golang language may have some deployment challenges, it compensates with its fast scalability. Golang is overall a good choice for resource-intensive tasks that need to process large amounts of data quickly. Go also maintains a high productivity over time, which can be crucial in some cases.
Python or Golang: which is better?
To get a better understanding of the main set of differences between Golang and Python, we need to compare their strengths and weaknesses. And although you can create scripts and integrate, say, static residential proxies into them for your tasks, in the crucial categories of speed and performance, Go can show better performance in most cases, with the right set of libraries. Language can show both fast speed of execution and overall performance. For tasks with quick processing requirements, Go will be more preferable than Python language, also because of the higher memory efficiency management.
But, it should be kept in mind that Golang and Python web scraping is always limited by the capacity and latency of the network. If a website can’t respond quickly enough, performance of specific tools becomes a second thought factor. This should be taken into account when you buy rotating proxies for more reliable Go or Python language scraping. Sometimes, you should change your IP periodically to make sure that the site would not detect your presence.
As mentioned before, Go language is built with thoughts of easy scalability. In that case Golang web scraping will be more preferable than Python language for tasks that potentially can use extensive data flow. Python in the same conditions will struggle due to the limit to multiple threads in one process. This problem can be worked around with the use of libraries like concurrent.futures or asyncio.
Implementing tools like that adds steps to the project design process and eats away developers time. But these cons are overhauled by ease of Python use. The Python tools set is often referred to as one of the easiest to learn and use. Programmers that are new to Python web scraping projects can adopt all needed tools fairly fast. Go web scraping, while also relatively easy to learn, has a steeper learning curve. It can affect the results of developers’ work, if he is not familiar with statically typed languages.
Returning to the Python ecosystem, it’s important to note the big diversity of frameworks and libraries. Python web scraping process can be eased by BeautifulSoup, Requests, and Scrapy libraries. Go web scraping, while it can’t provide that wide ecosystem, also has a big enough amount of tools specifically for this kind of task. Overall, developers may be needed to write more custom code while on Go than on Python language.
Python has more specific tutorials and ways to find support, due to its popularity. Go is fastly developing language and its community is still not as wide as the one of Python language. But recent years have shown that more projects are adopting Go as the main web scraping instrument.
Thus, the main use cases for Go and Python in web scraping shortens down to these:
Python
- Newbies and developers with short Python and overall programming experience
- Projects that relying on diversity of libraries and tools
- Tasks that involve сomplex analysis of different types of data
- Small to medium-scale web scraping projects
Go
- Developers with expertise in C, C++, or other statically typed languages
- Projects that rely on more complex and fast memory use
- Large-scale web scraping projects that need to handle multiple requests at a time and process large amounts of data
- Web scraping tasks that involve Docker and alike technologies
Web scraping projects can benefit from different languages, depending on their goals and challenges, and different types of proxies for that matter (HTTP(S) or SOCKS5 proxies). Python is a popular choice for beginners or developers who want a simple and powerful language with a rich ecosystem of libraries and tools. However, Golang web scraping can also offer advantages such as faster performance, lower memory consumption and better scalability for large projects.
In the end, the choice between Python and Go language will rely on the unique requirements of each project, developer experience and skill, and personal liking.
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