Hello 世界

December 31, 2018

I’m starting my Golang journey with Donovan and Kernighan’s “The Go Programming Language” (2016). Why? Becuase it’s a text which not only starts at the point where I currently find myself skills-wise (long-term dev experience with Java and heavy sojourns into other languages but nothing to speak of in the systems-programming space) but it also reminds me of the first ever programming book I bought; “The C Programming Language” by Kernighan and Ritchie. It made little sense to me at the time, and the C code I wrote was terrible, but the nostalgia is still strong, and Kernighan (and Donovan) can write on languages very clearly.

Donovan and Kernighan start their journey into Golang with the standard “Hello …” construct, and immediately there is a lot to take note of.

The Golang Toolchain

Golang is compiled, which you achieve by a combination of the go command and certain sub-commands. There are many of them, but here we see run and build (which builds a platform-specific executable that can be run without the go environment being installed.)

Unicode

You can see from the title of this post that we’re bidding hello in Japanese. Support for Unicode is native in Golang. Nothing new having come from the Java world, but nice to know.

Packages and Standard Libraries

Everygthing is packaged. Our code is packaged, and so are the Standard Libraries which are imported. So far so unexpected.

However there is a concept that is new to me; there is a special package called Main which contains entry points to your Golang programs. When complied, Main packages create standalone, executable programs.

Clean Syntax

No semicolons required!

Clean Style

It is Golang style to run gofmt and goimports on your code. That ensures all Golang code looks the same, and that there are no rogue (i.e. unused) imports.

Go-Managed, Easy-to-Use Toolchain

We don’t have the goimport tool for the toolchain in the default install, so we just go get it and it’s available to use.