Golang, also known as Go is an open-source programming language that was first created at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson in 2007. It was created with these things in mind:
- efficient execution
- efficient compilation
- ease of programming
It is statically typed and comes with memory allocation, garbage collection, and with concurrency built-in. Go’s design gives the language high performance and speed.
Getting Started: Install Go
To get started with Go, install it in your development environment. For that, visit the official Go download page, and download for your specific machine.
Confirm if the installation was successful by running the command go version. The output should be similar as shown below. ⬇️
go version go1.18 darwin/amd64
Writing Our First Go Program
Now we have installed Go on our machine, let's write our first Go program. In your code Open your code editor, and create a file called hello-world.go in , and add the following code shown below. ⬇️
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Println("Hello World!")
}
Now to run our code above, we run the command go run hello-world.go. The output is shown below. ⬇️
Hello World!
Let's look at the different parts of our program
package main: Go programs start running in the main package. It is a special package that is used with programs that are meant to be executable.
import fmt:
fmtis a core library package that contains functionalities related to formatting and printing output or reading input from various I/O sources.func main() {}: The
main()function is a special function that is the entry point of an executable program.
Links to learning resources.
Conclusion
In this article, we've seen how to set Go on our machine and write a program that prints Hello World! to the terminal. With the resources shared above, you're on the way to becoming a Go Pro 💪🏽. Alright, see you soon. ✌🏽