Go
Go is an open source programming language supported by Google. From the Go documentation:
- Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.
Installation
Install the go package, which includes the standard Go compiler and other development tools. See the go command documentation for a list of included subcommands.
Alternative Compilers
The go package includes the standard Go compiler, which is called gc. The following alternative compilers are also available.
gccgo
A frontend for GCC called gccgo is provided by the gcc-go package. ggcgo may produce faster binaries than gc in some cases and can target additional operating systems and architectures. In practice, gc produces faster binaries than gccgo for almost all workloads.
TinyGo
TinyGo is an LLVM based compiler designed to produce very small binaries for embedded systems and WebAssembly. It is provided by the tinygo package.
Tools
The following packages provide developer tools for Go:
- Go tools — Various tools and Go packages mostly for static analysis of Go programs.
- gopls — The official Go language server.
- Delve — A debugger for the Go programming language.
- go-bindata — A small utility which generates Go code from any file. Useful for embedding binary data in a Go program.
- GoReleaser — A release automation tool for Go projects.
- Yaegi — A Go interpreter. Includes the yaegi command-line interpreter/REPLo.
Install directory
The go install command installs Go executables either into a directory defined in the environment variable, or a subdirectory in the first entry in the environment variable. The default is .
For convenience, add the bin subdirectory to :
$ export PATH="$PATH:$(go env GOBIN):$(go env GOPATH)/bin"
See How to Write Go Code and for more information.
Tips and Tricks
Compiling source code
You can write a Hello World program as follows:
Then run it with the go tool:
$ go run hello.go
Hello, Arch!
Compilation with the standard compiler (same as ):
$ go build hello.go
Compilation with gccgo (same as ):
$ gccgo hello.go -o hello
Compilation with tinygo (same as ):
$ tinygo build -o hello ./hello.go
Cross compiling to other platforms
The standard compiler can natively cross-compile to a number of platforms. The procedure varies depending on whether the source code calls C code using cgo,
Without cgo
If cgo is not required for your build, then simply specify the target OS and architecture as env vars to go build:
$ GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm64 go build .
See the official documentation for the valid combinations of and .
With cgo
If cgo is required for your build, you have to provide the path to your C/C++ cross-compilers, via the / environment variables.
Say you want to cross-compile for and GOARCH=arm64.
You need first to install the cross-compiler.
Here is a sample program that requires cgo, so that we can test the cross-compilation process:
$ cat > hello.go <<EOF
package main
// #include <stdio.h>
// void hello() { puts("Hello, Arch!"); }
import "C"
func main() { C.hello() }
EOF
Then, you can cross-compile it like this:
$ GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm64 CGO_ENABLED=1 CC=/usr/bin/aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc go build hello.go
You can check that the architecture of the generated binary is actually aarch64:
$ file hello hello: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, ARM aarch64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux-aarch64.so.1, BuildID[sha1]=b1d92ae8840a019f36cc2aee4606b6ae4a581bf1, for GNU/Linux 3.7.0, not stripped
If you copy to a suitable host, you can test-run it:
[alarm@rpi3 ~]$ uname -a Linux alarm 5.3.8-1-ARCH #1 SMP Tue Oct 29 19:31:23 MDT 2019 aarch64 GNU/Linux [alarm@arpi3 ~]$ ./hello Hello, Arch!
Troubleshooting
Jetbrains Go Plugin
If you are using a Jetbrains IDE and the Go plugin cannot find your Go SDK path, you might be using an incompatible package. Remove the gcc-go package and replace it with go}. If your is set, the IDE should now be able to find your Go SDK at .