2 Go Basics
With so many programming languages out there, it's fair to wonder why anyone would have to invent yet another one. What the background is of the people behind Go and what the problems are they are trying to solve with this new language are some of the items we will address in this chapter.
These topics give us some perspective on the challenges large-scale software development presents to software developers today and why modern technologies such as programming languages are constantly evolving.
By the end of this chapter, you should have a better understanding of where Go comes from and its role in developing distributed systems running on multi-core processors, as well as becoming familiar with Go's source code structure as we go through the following areas:
- What is Go?
- Go's guiding principles
- Go source code file structure
- Go packages and modules
- Compiling Go programs
- Running Go programs online
- Exploring the Go tool to manage Go source code
