What is GOLang?

A guide to kick-start go programming!

Go or also known as GOLANG is a programming language which was developed at Google in the year 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. It is a statically-typed language and has syntax similar to C language. It was developed with the vision of high performance and fast development. Go provides a variety of features such as memory safety, garbage collection, dynamic-typing capability etc. It also has a rich standard library.

Why should you learn Go?

Go is open-source and backed up by a large corporation.
Many big companies like Google, Soundcloud, BBC etc use Go.
Go is a modern language and is fast as well as simple to learn.
Go has inbuilt concurrency support.

How to get started?

To get started with go you’ll need this things:

Your favorite text editor(Notepad, Atom, Sublime Text etc).
Go Compiler.

Text Editor:

You’ll need an editor to write your code and save it. These code files are called as source code files. For go programs you’ll need to save the files with “.go” extension.

Go Compiler:

The source code files that you’ll create are readable by humans but for computer to understand it, we have to convert it into machine language. Thats where compiler plays a role. The Go programming language compiler compiles the source code into its final executable program.

Downloading and Installation:

Steps to download:

Go to https://golang.org.

2. Click on Download Go.

3. Select the appropriate version according to your OS and system.

4. Follow the on-screen instructions.

5. After downloading and installing, open your Terminal to verify the installation by typing

go version

If the version is displayed like above, you are ready to begin Go programming!