Introduction to Go

last modified April 11, 2024

This is an introduction to the Go programming language. Go first appeared in 2009. Go is developed by Google.

Go

Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. Go is a statically typed, compiled programming language.

Go is similar to C. It is memory safe and has garbage collection. Go has high speed compilation and excellent tooling support. It contains built-in primitives for concurrency.

Go installation

First, we download the binaries from the https://golang.org/doc/install page.

$ ls go1.22.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz go1.22.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz

We have go version 1.22.2.

$ rm -rf /usr/local/go && tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.22.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz

We extract the archive to /usr/local/.

$ export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin

We add /usr/local/go/bin to the PATH, so that we can run the Go tool without having to specify the full path.

> winget install GoLang.Go

On Windows, we can use the winget package manager.

The Go tool

The go tool provides the standard way to fetch, build, and install Go packages and commands.

$ go version go version go1.22.2 linux/amd64

With the version option, we get the version of Go.

> go version go version go1.22.2 windows/amd64

This is the output on Windows.

    command
    description



    go build
    compiles packages and dependencies


    go env
    prints Go environment information


    go get
    adds dependencies to current module and installs them


    go install
    compiles and installs packages and dependencies


    go list
    lists packages and modules


    go run
    compiles and runs a Go program


    go version
    prints Go version

This is a partial list of Go tool commands.

Go first example

We create our first example.

$ mkdir simple $ cd simple

We create a project directory and relocate there.

$ go mod init zetcode.com/simple

We initiate a Go module.

main.go

package main

import “fmt”

func main() {

fmt.Println("Go simple example")

}

This is a simple Go program, which prints a message to the console.

$ go run main.go Go simple example

We can compile and execute the program in one go with go run command.

$ go build $ ls go.mod main main.go $ ./main Go simple example

We can create an executable program with go build.

$ go install $ ls ~/go/bin/ main

With the go install command, we install the binary to the special
GOPATH directory, which defaults to $HOME/go on Unix.

Source

The Go Programming Language Specification

In this article we have introduced the Go language.

Author

My name is Jan Bodnar, and I am a passionate programmer with extensive programming experience. I have been writing programming articles since 2007. To date, I have authored over 1,400 articles and 8 e-books. I possess more than ten years of experience in teaching programming.

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