Learning Go, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11. Go Tooling

A programming language doesn’t exist in isolation. For it to be useful, tools must help the developer turn source code into an executable. Since Go is intended to address the problems that software engineers face today and to help them build quality software, careful thought has been put into tooling that simplifies tasks that are often difficult with other development platforms. This includes improvements in how you build, format, update, validate, and distribute, and even how your users will install your code.

I have already covered many of the bundled Go tools: go vet, go fmt, go mod, go get, go list, go work, go doc, and go build. The testing support provided by the go test tool is so extensive, it is covered by itself in Chapter 15. In this chapter, you will explore additional tools that make Go development great, both from the Go team and from third parties.

Using go run to Try Out Small Programs

Go is a compiled language, which means that before Go code is run, it must be converted into an executable file. This is in contrast to interpreted languages like Python or JavaScript, which allow you to write a quick script to test an idea and execute it immediately. Having that rapid feedback cycle is important, so Go provides similar functionality via the go run command. It builds and executes a program in one step. Let’s go back to the first program from Chapter 1. Put it in a file called hello.go:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println ...