Rumeel Hussain - Beginning Go Programming : Build Reliable and Efficient Applications with Go

Rumeel Hussain and Maryam Zulfiqar

Beginning Go Programming

Build Reliable and Efficient Applications with Go

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This book is dedicated to Rumeels late mother and Abdullah Hassan.

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub (https://github.com/Apress). For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code.

About the Authors

Rumeel Hussain

A photo of Rumeel Hussain.

has a bachelors degree in computer science and is presently working as a Blockchain Solution Architect at BNB Chain, supporting the development and growth of the BNB Chain ecosystem. He is an information technology enthusiast with more than five years of experience leading and implementing blockchain applications and architectures, analyzing and refactoring modern programming languages like Go, troubleshooting cloud infrastructure, and assessing security risks. His current work is focused on leveraging blockchain technology and crypto to achieve the full potential of Web3 applications.

Maryam Zulfiqar

has four years of research experience and has a masters degree in computer science. She is currently working as a Tech Martian at BNB Chain. She also works as a senior researcher and developer. She is passionate about developer education, especially about sharing her knowledge on topics that are the talk of the town in the technology field. She has also worked in researcher and teamlead roles for HEC-funded projects targeted at community growth and welfare.

About the Technical Reviewer

Fabio Claudio Ferracchiati

is a senior consultant and a senior analyst/developer using Microsoft technologies. He works for BluArancio ( www.bluarancio.com ). He is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer for .NET, a Microsoft Certified Application Developer for .NET, a Microsoft Certified Professional, and a prolific author and technical reviewer. Over the past ten years, hes written articles for Italian and international magazines and coauthored more than ten books on a variety of computer topics.

Developed by Google in 2007, Go (aka GoLang) is a programming language designed with simplicity and speed as its focus. The design goals of Go were to create a simple and readable syntax of a dynamically-typed, high-level language programming language like Python, but also have the stability and efficiency of a statically-typed low-level language like C/C++. Supported by Google, Go is an open-source programming language and is easier to learn and get started with. It has built-in support for concurrency, a robust standard library, type safety, multiple built-in types, dynamic-typing capability, garbage collection, and several other advanced features , such as key-value maps and variable-length arrays. Go has the power to let you leverage the might that multi-core processors have to offer, which results in faster-running programs.

Any programmers natural concern about a programming language is whether the language is compiled or interpreted. JavaScript is an example of an interpreted language. Web browsers can directly read JavaScript source code and execute it at runtime. There is no pre-computation involved. Even though some interpreted environments can produce intermediate formats such as bytecode, there is no pre-computation step involved.

In contrast to an interpreted language, the source code of a compiled language is transformed into an operating system-specific format. Like C and C++, Go is a compiled language. However, compared to Java, whose source code is compiled into a format capable of running on different operating systems, Gos source code is compiled into an operating system-specific format. That means the code is executable only on the operating system for which it was compiled.

Go is a statically-typed language . That means its variables must have specific types. Nevertheless, it is not always mandatory to declare variables explicitly. The compiler can infer the types; however, at compilation time, the types are always known.

The capability to run a source code file without recompiling it can sometimes lead programmers to think that Go is an interpreted language. The real magic is in the background, where the source code is compiled into a temporary executable form. The compilation tool, Go, is required to build applications delivered to users. This is because the compiled executable is in a format that is operating-system-specific. Each Go application consists of a statically-linked runtime. During the compilation process of the application, a runtime component is packaged with the executable format. This is why the size of applications built using the Go language is comparatively larger than the source code. No external virtual machine is involved, so it is necessary to include a runtime package.