Start developing with golang

Step one, download Go

As I said in my previous post I will begin here. This was very painless, they then have a “Test your installation” section, what I found strange is the use of environment variables everywhere. It seems that if you don’t use the defaults for the installation and your workspace you need to set them manually. I wonder why they are used at all. I created my workspace and followed the hello world example.

I am using VS Code as my IDE, once I created my first go file, hello.go, it recommended I install the go extension, which I did.

I now have this code;

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
	fmt.Printf("hello, world\n");
}

I then ran go build in VS Code but I got an error that go was not recognised as a cmdlet. If I run go version outside of VS Code it works okay. I couldn’t work out what the problem was but after restarting my PC the command started to work inside Visual Studio Code. So, I am unsure of what the problem was, but it’s fixed now. The extension also prompted me to update it because I had changed one of the Environment Variables for Go.

So now after running go build I have an exe. After running go install it was installed into the bin directory. I then ran go clean and it was gone.

I still don’t quite understand the layout of the directory and what happens if I want to run multiple projects. I also don’t quite understand the purpose of all the environment variables, but I am now able to develop my first proper application.

I feel like this “How to Write Go Code” documentation will answer some of my questions so that’s where I will start next time.