First of all Happy New year to all. Great now we should be having a good start for the year 2014. So coming to the point. Being a developer I have worked on server languages and tools, naming ruby, rails, javascript, titanium, mongodb a few.
I also heard about some good languages coming out of womb, some looked very promising like go, elixir(runs on Erlang virtual machine) and julia. I started exploring, because of my curiousity and really hooked to them. Go is one of them that I also dared to use in production, and to my surprize it kept its promise. This special series will cover go language(from whichever perspective).
Go is a C like language, developed with keeping current system requirements and capabilities in mind, it has a robust memory management, garbage colletion, concurrency(via goroutine or coroutines actually). If you would like to read into details look into Go and wiki. It is not a OOPS language as paradigm is sifting back to functional and imperative languages.
Install it
Go get package for your operating system and install it from Golang Installation Page, export go executables to path.
you should be able to check if go has installed correctly by typing following in console
go version
#=> go version go1.2 darwin/amd64
# to list all commands available and get help
go help
#one should see something like
Go is a tool for managing Go source code.
Usage:
go command [arguments]
The commands are:
build compile packages and dependencies
clean remove object files
env print Go environment information
fix run go tool fix on packages
fmt run gofmt on package sources
get download and install packages and dependencies
install compile and install packages and dependencies
list list packages
run compile and run Go program
test test packages
tool run specified go tool
version print Go version
vet run go tool vet on packages
Use "go help [command]" for more information about a command.
Additional help topics:
c calling between Go and C
gopath GOPATH environment variable
importpath import path syntax
packages description of package lists
testflag description of testing flags
testfunc description of testing functions
Use "go help [topic]" for more information about that topic.Now next step is to setup a GOPATH, GOPATH is a directory where all go code dependencies; that one installs, resides. It also contains go projects that one builds. So GOPATH has to be set before we move on.
Let’s set it up somewhat like this in bash profile
#export GOPATH=<relative-or-complete-path-to-go-directory>
export GOPATH=/Users/xxx/code/go_source
#Now one should be able to seeEvery go project has a directory layout, as mentioned below
$GOPATH
|
|--- src/**/*.go # contains source code of go projects
|
|--- pkg
| |--- $GO_ARCH/*.a #contains go project objects
|
|--- bin #contains all binaries of installed go project
Go also has a very interesting third party packages integration tool called go get. It also detects popular vcs tools like git and integrates well with github. Here is an example for getting mongodb driver called mgo
# this will be installed under $GOPATH/src/github.com/xushiwei/mgo
go get github.com/xushiwei/mgoNow we are all set. So let’s start with our first code. Navigate to GOPATH directory under src create a new directory, name it hello_gopher and then make a file called hello_gopher.go
package main #defining name for currenct package
import "fmt" #way to import a package
func main(){ #function that should be run when invoking this package
fmt.Println("Hello tiny gopher!")
}#Now we can run it directly via go run. this command compiles and run given file
go run hello_gopher.go
#=> Hello tiny gopher!
#We can also compile this file and then use it
go build hello_gopher.go
#this will generate an executable with same name as file in this case hello_gopher
#that can be run/invoked directly by calling this as
./hello_gopher
#=> Hello tiny gopher!Happy Coding ;)
About The Author
I am Pankaj Baagwan, a System Design Architect. A Computer Scientist by heart, process enthusiast, and open source author/contributor/writer. Advocates Karma. Love working with cutting edge, fascinating, open source technologies.
To consult Pankaj Bagwan on System Design, Cyber Security and Application Development, SEO and SMO, please reach out at me[at]bagwanpankaj[dot]com
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Stay tuned <3. Signing off for RAAM