Hands-On High Performance with Go

Compiler and linker flags

While building a Go binary, the -gcflags flag lets you pass optional compiler arguments, while the -ldflags flag lets you pass optional linker arguments. A full list of compiler and linker flags can be found by invoking the following commands:

go tool compile -helpgo tool link -help

Let's look at an example of utilizing compiler and linker flags. We can build a simple program that returns the value of an uninitialized string variable. The following program seems innocuous enough:

package mainimport "fmt"var linkerFlag stringfunc main() {    fmt.Println(linkerFlag)}

If we build this with some of the common compiler and linker flags, we will see some helpful output:

The compiler flags that we passed here achieve the ...