stormic-nomad-nishant/golang

experiments with go

Golang

A self paced learning project for teaching Golang

Installing go

You can install golang by following the official doc: https://go.dev/learn/

Official Go Documentation

The official golang documentation can be found at: https://go.dev/doc/

• Packages can be found at https://pkg.go.dev/

Running a Go program

There are 2 ways to run a go program, the first one is long way:

1. In order to run a go program the first thing you need to do is compile it :

$ go build file_name.go

This will create a binary file that you can run as follows:

$ ./file_name

2. The second one is the short way of doing the same thing above using the go run command which abstracts the compilation step :

$ go run file_name.go

Background of Golang

• Go was originally created by Robert Griesemar, Rob Pike & Ken Thompson at Google.
• Why Have GO ?
  • Python : Easy to use but slow as its interprted language
  • Jave : Quick but the type system is very complex
  • C/C++ : Quick , but type system is complex and takes a lot of time to compile code.
  • Concurrancy is later patched in the above language.
• Go is Strongly typed language.
  • A strongly typed language makes sure that the a variable cannot be changed over time. i.e if you declare a variable to hold a as an int then you cannot later choose to store a string value to it
  • Strongly typed is a concept used to refer to a programming language that enforces strict restrictions on intermixing of values with differing data types. When such restrictions are violated and error (exception) occurs.
  • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2690544/what-is-the-difference-between-a-strongly-typed-language-and-a-statically-typed
• Go is also a statically typed language.
  • A language is statically typed if the type of a variable is known at compile time.
  • Statically typed programming languages do type checking (i.e. the process of verifying and enforcing the constraints of types) at compile-time as opposed to run-time. Ex: Java, C, C++
  • Dynamically typed programming languages do type checking at run-time as opposed to compile-time. Ex: Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript
• GO Key Features:
  • Simplicity
  • Extreamly fast compile time
  • Automatically Garbage Collection : https://medium.com/safetycultureengineering/an-overview-of-memory-management-in-go-9a72ec7c76a8
  • Built-in Concurrancy : https://www.golang-book.com/books/intro/10
  • Compile to standalone binaries: Everything once your program is compiled is wrapped up in one binary.