Getting Started

What is Go

Go (also called Golang) is a statically compiled language open-sourced by Google in 2009. It emphasizes a concise syntax, a built-in concurrency model (goroutines / channels), fast compilation, and single-binary deployment. It is widely used for backend services, CLI tools, and cloud-native infrastructure — Docker, Kubernetes, and Prometheus are all written in Go.

Installation

Download the installer from the official site, set up your PATH, and verify the version:

$ go version
go version go1.22.0 windows/amd64

Hello World

Create a file hello.go:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hello, World!")
}

Run it:

$ go run hello.go
Hello, World!

Initialize a Module

Go 1.11+ uses Go Modules for dependency management. The first step for a new project:

$ mkdir myapp && cd myapp
$ go mod init example.com/myapp