Introduction

Since the introduction of Go in 2009, there have been several changes in how Go developers organize their code and their dependencies. Because of this churn, there’s lots of conflicting advice, and most of it is obsolete. For modern Go development, the rule is simple: you are free to organize your projects as you see fit.

It was meant to be a replacement for C and C++ codebases some things simpler, like concurrency or memory management, with garbage collection and also, to work along with C and C++ codebases, thanks to its C interoperability features.

Out of the box, Go ships with many development tools. You access these tools via the go command.

• They include a compiler, code formatter, linter, dependency manager, test runner, and more.

Basic Go Commands:

• go version - Prints out the version of the Go runtime installed
• go env - Prints out a list of Go environment variables
• go fmt - Formats given Go files
• go run - Executes given a Go file/program
• go build - Builds an executable/binary given a Go file/program
  • Go is portable meaning you can distribute this binary and everyone can run the program as-is, because the binary is already packaged for execution.
  • The program will run on the same architecture we built it on.
  • We can create a different binary for a different architecture using the GOOS and GOARCH environment variables.

Go offers a large standard library ready to use that we can use for anything from network connectivity to math, crypto, image processing, filesystem access, and more.

GO’s Ecosystem for package and dependency management

Earlier the GOPATH setup allowed developers to import packages as long as they were in the local Go workspace.

As of Go ~1.13 it’s recommended to use go mod. With go mod, source code isn’t required to be a part of the GOPATH environment variable.

Go doesn’t use a package manager like NPM or Cargo. The Go toolchain provides commands like go get for fetching external dependencies straight from their remote source control repositories, and go mod for managing the dependencies of a specific project.

Before you start Some GO tips

Leave your object oriented brain at home. Embrace the interface.

Learn to do things the Go way, don’t try to force your language idioms into Go.