What I Learned Building a Real-Time Chat App With WebSockets in Go

As developers, we often reach for the usual suspects — REST APIs, GraphQL, or third-party services — even when our app requirements lean toward real-time communication. A few months ago, I needed to build a simple chat server that updates instantly without polling, so I decided to explore WebSockets using Go (Golang). In this post I’ll walk through: What WebSockets are How they differ from REST A minimal Go implementation What problems you might run into along the way 🔁 Why WebSockets? Most HTTP-based APIs (including REST) are request/response — meaning the client asks, then the server replies. That works for many use cases, but not for: Chat apps Live dashboards Real-time games Collaborative tools WebSockets, on the other hand, allow persistent bidirectional communication between client and server without repeated polling. 🚀 WebSockets in Go — Example Code Here’s a basic WebSocket handler using the popular gorilla/websocket package: package main import ( "github.com/gorilla/websocket"