Mastering Go - Second Edition

The Go compiler

The Go compiler is executed with the help of the go tool, which does many more things than just generating executable files.

The unsafe.go file used in this section does not contain any special code – the presented commands will work on every valid Go source file.

You can compile a Go source file using the go tool compile command. What you will get is an object file, which is a file with the .o file extension. This is illustrated in the output of the next commands, which were executed on a macOS Mojave machine:

$ go tool compile unsafe.go
$ ls -l unsafe.o
-rw-r--r--  1 mtsouk  staff  6926 Jan 22 21:39 unsafe.o
$ file unsafe.o
unsafe.o: current ar archive
  

An object file is a file that contains object code, which is machine ...