# Go

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- Go package guidelines

This article or section needs expansion.

Reason: Mention delve. Perhaps in a Tools section. Also should explain tinygo. (Discuss in Talk:Go#)

Go is a statically-typed language with syntax loosely derived from that of C, adding garbage collected memory management, type safety, some dynamic-typing capabilities, additional built-in types such as variable-length arrays and key-value maps, and a large standard library.

## Installation

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Reason: Recommends go over gcc-go without stating why. (Discuss in Talk:Go#gccgo vs gc)

The standard Go compiler is `go`, which can be installed from the go package. The `go` command also include various tooling such as `go get`, `go doc`, etc. An alternative is gcc-go, which is a Go frontend for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). In some cases `gccgo` may do better optimisations. When in doubt: use `go`.

An additional package that most Go developers will want to install is go-tools. This will provide various commonly used tools which will make working with Go easier, such as `goimports`, `guru`, `gorename`, etc.

### Test your installation

You can check that Go is installed correctly by building a simple program, as follows:

    hello.go

    package main

    import "fmt"

    func main() {
        fmt.Println("Hello, Arch!")
    }

Then run it with the go tool:

    $ go run hello.go

    Hello, Arch!

Compilation with standard gc compiler (same as `go build -compiler=gc hello.go`):

    $ go build hello.go

Compilation with gccgo (same as `go build -compiler=gccgo hello.go`):

    $ gccgo hello.go -o hello

### $GOPATH

Go expects the source code to live inside `$GOPATH`, which is set to `~/go` by default.

Tip: You can see all Go variables by running `go env`

Create that workspace:

    $ mkdir -p ~/go/src

The `~/go/src` directory is used to store the sources of the packages. When compiling Go will also create `bin` for executables and `pkg` to cache individual packages. You will probably want to add `~/go/bin` to the `$PATH` environment variable to run installed Go:

    export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/go/bin"

Run `go help gopath` for more information.

Tip: `$GOPATH` works like `$PATH` and can contain multiple entries, this can be useful to split out packages downloaded with `go get` and your own source code; e.g. `GOPATH=$HOME/go:$HOME/mygo`

### Cross compiling to other platforms

The `go` command can natively cross-compile to a number of platforms.

If cgo is not required for your build, then simply specify the target OS and architecture as env vars to `go build`:

    $ GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm64 go build .

See the official documentation for the valid combinations of `$GOOS` and `$GOARCH`.

On the other hand, if cgo is required for your build, you have to provide the path to your `C/C++` cross-compilers, via the `$CC/$CXX` env vars.

Say you want to cross-compile for `$GOOS=linux` and `$GOARCH=arm64`.

You need first to install the aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc cross-compiler.

Here is a sample program that requires `cgo`, so that we can test the cross-compilation process:

    $ cat > hello.go <<EOF
    package main

    // #include <stdio.h>
    // void hello() {  puts("Hello, Arch!"); }
    import "C"

    func main() { C.hello() }
    EOF

Then, you can cross-compile it like this:

    $ GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm64 CGO_ENABLED=1 CC=/usr/bin/aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc go build hello.go

You can check that the architecture of the generated binary is actually `aarch64`:

    $ file hello
    hello: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, ARM aarch64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux-aarch64.so.1, BuildID[sha1]=b1d92ae8840a019f36cc2aee4606b6ae4a581bf1, for GNU/Linux 3.7.0, not stripped

If you copy `hello` to a suitable host, you can test-run it:

    [alarm@rpi3 ~]$ uname -a
    Linux alarm 5.3.8-1-ARCH #1 SMP Tue Oct 29 19:31:23 MDT 2019 aarch64 GNU/Linux
    [alarm@arpi3 ~]$ ./hello
    Hello, Arch!

## Troubleshooting

### Jetbrains Go Plugin

If you are using a Jetbrains IDE and the Go plugin cannot find your Go SDK path, you might be using an incompatible package. Remove the `gcc-go` package and replace it with `go`. If your `$GOPATH` is set, the IDE should now be able to find your Go SDK at `/usr/lib/go`.

## See also

- Official website
- Wikipedia article
- Examples with small descriptions
- Interactive Go training tour
- Go cross compilation
- IDEs and Plugins for Go

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