Getting Started With Golang

Introduction

Golang is a General Purpose programming language developed by Google engineers Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson, and Rob Pike in the year 2007. Golang is also known as Go. Golang is open-source.

Table of Contents

• Overview of Go
• Features of Golang
• Go Getting Started
• Conclusion

Overview of Go

Applications developed using Go works faster since the code is compiled to native machine code and does not need any interpreter. Go is able to solve a lot of problems and also we can use Go for system and network programming, big data, machine learning, and more and more.

As similar to C and C++, Go is a compiled language, and allocate memory management is properly handled.

Main Features of Golang

• Ease of use together with state-of-the-art productivity
• High-level efficiency along with static typing
• Advanced performance for networking and the full use of multi-core power
• Go can be used for all kinds of software development solutions such as a system programming language, a general programming language, or general support.
• It can handle heavy server-centric web services, text-processing problem, and heavy-duty distributed applications.

Go Getting Started

First thing first, before learning anything new, we should know why we need to learn Golang.

• Easy to Learn – Since Golang belongs to C, there are more similarities and its very easy to learn.
• Fast Development – Go speeds up the Development process and meets network communication, memory management as well.
• Easy Server-Side Programming – Go library provides the standard HTTP protocol and makes easy to work with the Server Side.

Install IDE

IDE’s like Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Vim, Eclipse, and Notepad can be used to Code and Debug Golang. For now, let us use VS Code.

• Open VS Code Editor.
• Open the extension manager.
• Search “go”.
• Find the Go extension by the GO team at Google and install it
• After the installation is complete, open the command palette by pressing Ctrl + Shift + p
• Run the Go: Install/Update Tools command
• Select all the provided tools and click OK

Open Terminal and enter the below command

go mod init example.com/hello

Now, let us create a new file as FirstGoApp.go. The .go is the file extension of Go.

Open a terminal in VS Code and type

go run .\FirstGoApp.go

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed Golang. Hope this was a good getting started article for us and we will discuss more in detail in our upcoming articles. Please share your feedback in the comment section.

Happy Learning !!!! Cheers !!!!!