When Go was initially designed, it was built with the intent of being a “Modern C” or a reimagining of what C would be like, had it been invented in the Year of our Lord Alan Turing, 2015.
Go is a compiled, strongly typed, multi-paradigmed, garbage-collected language that focuses on simplicity and speed rather than a vast type system, or single-paradigm behavior.
It has recieved critical acclaim as well as criticism from throughout the community but its nature has lent itself well to becoming a solid choice for backend, service-centered architecture, while remaining fast and memory-safe.
Often, if you are forever online, you might know of the debate that rages between Rust users, Go users, Haskell users, and Ocaml users, however I find these debates rather cumbersome and pointless. I live by the idea that most programming languages are good and serve their purpose well, even ABAP, which I work with professionally see this Y Combinator forum post from 2020 to get a sense for how SAP Engineers feel about it.
With this being said, you can expect to breeze through the syntax of Go fairly quickly, but find, that like C, the complexity rests under the hood and in your own knowledge. With that out of the way, let’s dive into our first Go program!
Hello Go
Let’s look at that classic first example: Hello, World!
package main
include "fmt"
func main(){
fmt.Println("Hello, World!")
}
to compile and run, save this file as hello.go and open the terminal. cd to the director/folder where your hello.go is located and run the following command:
go run hello.go
The terminal should display Hello, World!
the go command is an important part of the go programming language that we call the go toolchain. We can compile with go build and run without compiling with go run.
Breaking down the code
We start with line 1: package main. This tells the compiler that we are putting our code into a bundle of other code files we call the main package. the Go compiler looks for a main package and a main method, where it will start from.
There is some pre-written, pre-packaged code that comes with the Go language, and these codes are bundled into packaged. To use them we use the include keyword.
next is a special function we call main. A function is a block of code that takes in some input, and can spit out an output. We’ll talk more about them later but for now, just know that it exists.
On the next line, we have fmt.Println("Hello, World!"). fmt is our package of code that we are using and we are using a specific function from this code called Println() which takes some input (in our case "Hello, World!") and turns it into some output onto the console screen.
And that’s it, that is your first Go program! In the next post, we’ll talk more about functions and some other things called variables and conditional logic.