Go¶

My first experience with go!

In my effort to learn a new language I started to checkout Go and Rust both for some days and do a bit in both to decide which one to choose for a deeper experience. I worked a lot with Java later with NodeJS but both have some problems for me. Java is not after my liking, while NodeJS is great for fast prototyping but get problems if the project grows really big.

So in this article I describe the findings of Go as an notebook for myself.

Installation¶

This is done really easy under Linux:

# download
curl -O https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.8.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz
# install
sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.8.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz
rm go1.8.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz
# set path to go and compiled programs
echo "export GOPATH=$HOME/go" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "export GOPATH=$HOME/go" >> ~/.profile
echo "export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin:$GOPATH/bin" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin:$GOPATH/bin" >> ~/.profile
export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin:$GOPATH/bin
# install additional helpers
go get -u github.com/nsf/gocode
go get -u github.com/golang/lint/golint

Other installation methods also exist see the Project Site.

You will find all the go related stuff below a go folder in your home directory.

Learning¶

To dive into I worked through the following resources:

File Structure¶

The go workspace (~/go under Linux) contains the following directories:

src/                            # sources
  github.com/alinex/go-learn    # package source
    .git/                       # version control system
    ...
pkg/                            # downloaded packages
bin/                            # executable commands

Editor¶

At first I use the Atom editor with the following plugins:

go-plus
go-debug
go-signature-statusbar
formatter-gofmt

No need for a style guide here because formatting is done bygofmt on it's own on saving.

The above installers go-signature-statusbar will you show a reference using Alt-D with the cursor on a specific symbol.

Build Tools¶

All the possible tools are combined in the go cli tool:

go build          # check if it can be compiled
go install        # to build and make a runnable command
go test           # run unit tests
<name>            # to directly run it, because you have it in your path
go get <path>     # fetch and install

Documenting¶

To show your documentation in the browser start the godoc server:

godoc -http=:6060 &                 # to start it in the background
xdg-open http://localhost:6060/pkg/ # to open the package list in the browser

And then go in your browser to Learning Go.