Hello World in Go

Dec 29, 2020 chromeos go

The Go programming language is an open source project to make programmers more productive.
In the following blog post I assume you already have the Go environment setup. To get started with Go is just a matter of adding some code. The example below covers a basic "Hello World".

Go Installation

Confirm Go is installed

1go version

If it is not installed check out a previous post to install Go in Linux

Development setup

With go already installed, the setup requires a couple more steps

Create a directory for your code
Initialise the location where the module can be found

Make the go home directory
```
1mkdir -p ~/hello && cd hello
```
Initialise the hello directory

1go mod init example.com/hello

The directory should now look like this:

1.
2└── go.mod

Hello World

In the hello world example we will perform three things

Declare a package name
Import the "fmt" package to use the fmt.Println function
Declare a main func - which is the entry point for our go application

Create a hello.go program using an editor e.g.
```
1vi hello.go
```

Add the following code to hello.go

1package main
2import "fmt"
3func main() {
4  fmt.Println("hello, world\n")
5}

The directory should now look like this:

1.
2├── go.mod
3└── hello.go

Build go

The last thing to do is build our application and run it.

Build the hello.go application
```
1go build
```
The directory should now look like this:

1.
2├── go.mod
3├── hello
4└── hello.go

Run the code hello application
```
1./hello
```

The application output should be as per below:

hello, world