There are plenty of languages in the system programming space nowadays: some are well established, such as C and C++; some form a wave of newcomers, such as Zig, Rust, and Odin; and others claim the title of “C/C++ killer,” with their pledges of impressive performance.

Sure, we can use all of them and achieve outstanding results. Still, we could fall into hidden traps such as a steep learning curve, high cognitive load, a lack of community and support, inconsistent APIs with constant breaking changes, and a lack of adoption.

Go’s design philosophy emphasizes simplicity, expressiveness, robustness, and efficiency. Its support for concurrency and strong dependency management, as well as its focus on composition, make it a compelling choice for system programming. Its creators aimed to build a language that provides powerful building blocks without unnecessary complexity, which makes writing, reading, understanding, and maintaining system-level code...

One of the most essential features of Go is its concurrency model. Concurrency is the ability to run multiple tasks at the same time. In system programming, executing many tasks in parallel is essential for improving the performance and responsiveness of our programs.

Concurrency

Real-time systems demand precision, with concurrency being a pivotal factor. These systems coordinate tasks with exceptional timing, particularly in scenarios where even milliseconds matter. Concurrency offers significant advantages by increasing throughput (a measure of how many units of information a system can process in a given amount of time) while decreasing task completion times. Real-life instances show how concurrency improves responsiveness, making systems more flexible and tasks more efficient. Moreover, concurrency’s isolation abilities guarantee data integrity by preventing interference.

System programming involves a diverse range of tasks, from CPU-bound...

Go’s approach to system calls is designed to be safe and efficient, especially in the context of its concurrency model.

In Go, system calls are comparatively lower-level in comparison to certain other programming languages. It can be helpful if you need fine-grained control over system resources, but it also means you’re dealing with more low-level details.

Making system calls often requires understanding the underlying operating system APIs and conventions. The side effect is that it can introduce a steeper learning curve if you are new to systems programming or lower-level development.

Not familiar with system calls? Fear not! The book’s second part will explore and experiment with them in detail to cover the main aspects we need to progress in our system programming journey.

Go is like a toolbox. It has everything we need to build great software, so we don’t need anything more than its standard tools to create our programs.

Let’s explore the principal tools that facilitate building, testing, running, error-checking, and code formatting.

go build

The go build command is used to compile Go code into an executable binary that you can run.

Let’s see an example.

Assume you have a Go source file named main.go containing the following code:

package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hello, Go!")
}

You can compile it using the go build command:

go build main.go

This will generate an executable binary named main (or main.exe on Windows). You can then run the binary to see the output:

./main

go test

The go test command is used to run tests on your Go code. It automatically finds test files and runs the associated test functions.

Here’s an...

Cross-platform development with Go is a breeze. You can write code running on various operating systems and architectures with ease.

Cross-platform development with Go can be achieved by using the GOOS and GOARCH environment variables. The GOOS environment variable specifies the OS you want to target, and the GOARCH environment variable specifies your target architecture.

For example, assume you have a Go source file named main.go:

package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
    fmt.Println("This program runs in any OS!")
}

To compile code for Linux, you would set the GOOS environment variable to linux and the GOARCH environment variable to amd64:

GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build

This command will compile the code for Linux.

You can also use the GOOS and GOARCH environment variables to run code on different platforms. For example, to run the code you compiled for Linux on macOS, you would set...

This chapter provided a comprehensive guide to why Go is a top choice for system programming and insights into Go’s design philosophy, emphasizing simplicity, robustness, and efficiency. We learned about Go’s concurrency model, its approach to interacting with the OS, and how to interact with the tools for cross-platform development. These lessons are helpful as they equip us with the knowledge needed to write, read, and maintain system-level code with Go, enabling improved performance and the ability to work with concurrency.

In the next chapter, we explore the concurrency concepts, refreshing all related concepts and building blocks. It will prepare us for more advanced interactions with OS interfaces, enhancing our ability to create powerful and responsive programs.