Go Systems Programming

Getting ready for Go

You can easily find your version of Go using this command:

$ go version
go version go1.7.5 darwin/amd64  

The previous output is from a macOS machine hence the darwin string. A Linux machine would give the following kind of output:

$ go version
go version go1.3.3 linux/amd64

You will learn more about go tool, which you will use all the time, in the next chapters.

As I can imagine, you must be impatient to see some Go code; so here is the Go version of the famous Hello World program:

package main 
 
import "fmt" 
 
// This is a demonstrative comment! 
func main() { 
   fmt.Println("Hello World!") 
} 

If you are familiar with C or C++, you will find Go code pretty easy to understand. Each file that contains Go code begins with a package ...