Let’s Go There: Your first Go Program
Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. — The Golang Official Website
Hey, we are going to look at getting you to write your first Go program. This would be a prologue to a series that I would be putting together shortly where we would Go(pun intended!) into modern web development with Go. Ready to be a gopher eh? Strap on your seat belt and let’s Go! 😀
Wait, why should I care?
Convincing you to learn Go isn’t the purpose of this article but not to worry there are some awesome articles that should whet your appetite on the said matter. Let me point you to a few:
Installation
This article would focus on installation on a Windows machine. Head over to the go website. Click on the download Go button
This will take you to the download page, then click on windows download button. As per the time of writing this article, the current version of Go is 1.11.4.
Do ensure you click on the button for downloading the .msi installer for Windows.
Clicking on the Microsoft Windows link as shown above would begin the download of the go installer for windows. Once download is complete double click to start installation process. It’s pretty intuitive from here on(clicking next, next and all that on the installation wizard)
Once the installation is complete, open a terminal or command prompt then type in:
go version
This should output something similar to the screenshot below:
Hooray! You have Go installed and ready for duty on your windows machine 😎
If you didn’t see a version number then perhaps something wrong. Leave a comment and let’s fix it together. 💪
Hello World
You already know what’s going to happen right? We are going to say hello to the world in Go 😄.
- Create a folder(call it HelloWorld or something) from your command prompt then open that folder in your favorite text editor (if you are like me then that’s vscode!)
- Create a file and call it hello.go and type in the following code.
After typing the above code, go over to your terminal(make sure you are in the same directory as the go source file you just created). Then type in:
go run hello.go
Since go is a compiled laguage, the above would compile your source file into an executable(.exe) and then run it. You should see Hello World as the output if everything goes well(they usually do 😁)
Alert the media! You are a gopher!
And that’s it, pretty simple eh? You’ve written your first go program(nothing fancy but it sure feels good doesn’t it?). Be sure to leave a comment and some claps if you find this helpful and follow me for the series on web development with Go.
Clone or download this repo on Github for the source code.
Also check out my curated lists of awesome resources for learning Go on Github. Feel free to submit a P.R if you have some awesome resources on learning Go yourself(Sharers Keepers! 😃)
Happy Deploying!
