Integrated Development Environment - IDE
An IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is basically a user interface to help developers, code their programs by providing a set of tools to speed up common tasks during development process like compiling, building, or managing dependencies. The IDEs are powerful tools that take some time to master and the purpose of this book is not to explain them (an IDE like Eclipse has its own books).
In Go, you have many options but there are only two that are fully oriented to Go development LiteIDE and Intellij Gogland. LiteIDE is not the most powerful though but Intellij has put lots of efforts to make Gogland a very nice editor with completion, debugging, refactoring, testing, visual coverage, inspections, etc. Common IDEs or text editors that have a Go plugin/integration are as following:
- IntelliJ Idea
- Sublime Text 2/3
- Atom
- Eclipse
But you can also find Go plugins for:
- Vim
- Visual Studio and Visual Code
The IntelliJ Idea and Atom IDEs, for the time of this writing, has the support for debugging using a plugin called Delve. The IntelliJ Idea is bundled with the official Go plugin. In Atom you'll have to download a plugin called Go-plus and a debugger that you can find searching the word Delve
.