Getting started with Go

Go is a general purpose programming language aiming at resolving some of the short-comings observed in other languages. Some key features of Go is that it’s statically typed, and has a major focus on making scalability, multiprocessing and networking easy.

In today’s post, I’ll go through some of the steps that I’ve taken to prepare a development environment that you can be immediately productive in.

Code organisation

To take a lot of the think work out of things, as well as present a consistent view from machine-to-machine, there are some strict rules around code organisation. A full run-down on the workspace can be found here; but for the purposes of today’s article we’ll look at locating a folder at ~/Source/go.

Docker for development

To not clutter my host system, I make extensive use of Docker containers. Docker containers allow me to run multiple versions of the same software concurrently, but also make all of my environments disposable. Whilst the instructions below will be centralised around the go command, all of these will be executed in context of a golang container. The following command sets up a container for the duration of one command’s execution:

docker run -ti --rm -v ~/Source/go:/go golang

-ti runs the container interactively allocating a TTY; --rm cleans the container up after the command has finished executing; we mount our go source folder inside the container at the pre-configured /go directory.

I found it beneficial to make an alias in zsh wrapping this up for me.

Hello, world

Getting that first application up and running is pretty painless. We need to create a directory for our project, build and run.

# Create the project folder
mkdir -p src/github.com/user/hello

# Get editing the program
cd src/github.com/user/hello
vim hello.go

As you’d expect, we create our program:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
  fmt.Printf("Hello, world\n")
}

Now we can build the program.

go install github.com/user/hello

We’re done

You’ll have a binary waiting for you to execute now.

bin/hello
Hello, world