Go Language Lecture Notes

Introduction to Go

• Statically typed language: Variable types need to be explicitly declared or inferred; immutable without type conversion.
• Strongly typed: Operations depend on types; mixing types like integer and string is not allowed.
• Advantages: Thorough error checking, better code completion, faster execution.

Compilation

• Compiler: Translates code into machine code, producing a binary file, faster than interpreted languages like Python.
• Example: Loop counting to 100 million runs significantly faster in Go compared to Python.
• Quick compilation: Enables a faster test-compile-debug cycle.

Concurrency

• Built-in concurrency: Using go routines for parallelism without special packages.
• Example: Running loop concurrently.

Simplicity

• Philosophy: Concise syntax, fewer lines of code, automatic garbage collection.

Setting Up Environment

• Installation: Go to the Go website and follow installation instructions for your OS (Linux, Mac, Windows).
• Verification: Run go version in the terminal to ensure Go is installed.

Project Initialization

• Creating a project: Initialize with go mod init <module_name>, often named after GitHub repo location.
• Go mod file: Lists the module name and Go version.
• Editor options: Vim, Neovim, VSCode, etc.
• Main package: Entry point defined by main function in the main package.
• Imports: Import packages using syntax like `import