Ready, set, go! An introduction to the Go programming language

Ready, set, go! An introduction to the Go programming language

• 1.
  Ready, Set, GO! ChadMcCallum ASP.NET MVP iQmetrix Software www.rtigger.com - @ChadEmm An Introduction to the Go Programming Language
• 2.
  What is Go? A programming language!  Initially created as a Google 20% project  Released as an open source project on November 10th, 2009  Go 1 (version 1) released on March 28th, 2012
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  The Software DevelopmentLandscape  Born out of frustration with current languages  There was a choice between efficient compilation, efficient execution, or ease of programming – most languages didn’t offer all three  Computers are faster, but software development isn’t  Dependency management is an unnecessarily large, complex part of software development  The complexity and awkwardness of type systems are losing out to languages like Python and JavaScript  Old languages haven’t caught up to modern affordances, like garbage collection and parallel computation  Multicore programming is scary and worrysome
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  Enter Go  Possibleto compile a large program in a few seconds on a single computer  Provides a dependency model that avoids the overhead of traditional systems  The type system has no hierarchy, so no time is lost defining relationships  Fully garbage collected and provides primitives for concurrent execution and communication  By design, offers an approach to system software on multicore machines
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  A Review ofGo’s Features  Simple language specification  Compiles statically linked binaries without external dependencies  Remote package management  Concurrency primitives
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  Simple Language Specification “Language specification simple enough to keep in a programmer’s head”  No type inheritance (uses duck typing)  No method or operator overloading  No pointer math  No assertions  No generic programming
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  Statically Linked Binaries Compiles to native machine code (x86 and ARM)  All referenced libraries are compiled into the same binary – no need to install libraries or framework on target machine  Because there’s no intermediate language, interpreter, or framework, applications start and run with minimal overhead
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  Remote Package Management Can import dependencies directly from remote repositories, like GitHub, BitBucket, Google Code  go get github.com/ChadMcCallum/gotest  Uses the current version of the code in “master” (git) or “default” (mercurial)  Downloaded to local GOPATH folder
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  Concurrency Primitives  goroutine– executes function on a lightweight process  Similar to task pools in .NET, functions are executed on any available thread allocated by the application  Ensures routines don’t block each other  Allows developers to write synchronous code while being fully non- blocking  Channels provide a way to read and write between routines without managing synchronization  A routine that writes to a channel will wait until its message is received  A routine that reads from a channel will wait until it receives a message
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  Why Choose Go? Why choose any language?  Popularity – is there a decent amount of community support?  Language-domain match – is the strengths of the language geared towards your problem domain?  Libraries – what packages already exist that you can reuse?  Efficiency – does the compiler and execution match up with your project’s requirements?  Tools – do the appropriate coding, debugging, tracing, and testing tools exist?
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  Popularity  Currently 36thon the TIOBE Index (March 2014)  Used in a number of large projects at Google  Youtube.com, dl.google.com, Google App Engine  Used in a number of production systems  Bit.ly, Torbit, pool.ntp.org, Canonical, CloudFlare, Conformal, Nov artis, BBC, SoundCloud, Moovweb, Heroku, Nokia  4472 questions in StackOverflow  16681 topics on the golang-nuts group
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  Language-Domain Match  Targetedat systems programming  Strengths in concurrency and deployment model  Mostly used in server and message-processing scenarios  Can, and does, support other scenarios  Web apps, games, graphical tools, education
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  Libraries  25,522 repositorieson GitHub  Application containers,  web frameworks,  websockets,  continuous integration,  shared key-value stores,  shared cache,  distributed messaging,  maching imaging,  SQL engines,  service orchestration,  client code generation,  analytics,  autocomplete,  load testing,  http traffic capture,  static site generation,  geolocation,  PaaS
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  Efficiency  Natively compiledbinaries  Not interpreted  No external dependencies  No Intermediate Language, Common Language Runtime, or Virtual Machine  Calculating 8 primes in parallel .NET Tasks – 12.6 seconds Goroutines – 5.99 seconds
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  Tools  go build– compiles packages and dependencies into executable  go fix – rewrites programs that use old APIs to use the newest version  go fmt – changes source code to match go standard  go get – download and install packages and dependencies  go install – compile and install packages and dependencies  go run – compile and run program  go test – run tests in packages
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  IDEs  LiteIDE –cross-platform IDE with support for Go and Markdown  Go plugin for Eclipse (Goclipse) – plugin for Eclipse  Zeus – Windows-only IDE with Go support  All three offer debugging, syntax highlighting, and code completion
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  Ready, Set, GO! golang.org  tour.golang.org  play.golang.org  godoc.org  gobyexample.com  goinggo.net Chad McCallum @ChadEmm www.rtigger.com