Subhadip's Blog

My experience with the computing world!

Coding with Go - Part 1 : The Workspace Setup

Go (sometimes referred as Golang) is the system programming language from Google which is my new interest these days. Some of my favourite points about Go so far:

  1. It's a compiled language and I like compiled languages. To somebody who has used C/C++ and later Java for programming, this should come as no surprise.
  2. It has fairly easy syntax and it's not a lot different from C which definitely helps to learn the language quickly.
  3. It can be used like a scripting language.
  4. It has a fairly large built-in package collection.
  5. It has first class Linux support.

Here's what I did to get my workstation ready to code with Go:

  1. Installing Go: Since I am using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and the Golang version in the official repository is very old, I downloaded the tar.gz for my platform from official Golang website and installed manually (the downside is that it will not be automatically updated when a new version comes out). The installation steps are given on the website itself. The steps are easy enough for a newbie in Go like me to follow (I installed Go in a custom location, so I had to do some extra steps). A word of advice, if you are using Ubuntu and if you are to set an environment variable (like GOROOT, PATH), use .pam_environment instead of writing in the .bash_rc or .profile file (read the official documentation).
  2. Getting the editor ready: I am using Atom editor with the go-plus plugin. To install the go-plus plugin, go to Atom -> Preferences -> Install, search for go-plus package and install. It provides syntax and compilation error highlighting, auto-completion and some other features. One important point though, do not forget to set the GOPATH environment variable or else the go-plus plugin will not function properly. If Atom does not suit your taste, you can use one from a bunch of other editors listed here.
  3. Coding with Go: One of the good things about Go is the quality of the official documentation. Instructions from here should give you enough idea about compiling and running the Go code.

Although, things are looking great now, something that I am missing a lot is a good debugger for Go. You can debug Go with GDB but it's not fully supported. There are some other debuggers available though, but I haven't had the time to evaluate them yet.



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