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Getting started with golang

How I got to know go

"Wait, what? What's happening here? Your previous blog posts were all about frontend development, CSS JavaScript, React. Now this..go? What is it? And why are you blogging about it?"

If this new content on my blog confuses you a little, I'm sorry! A lot of new things happened to me in the last months and one of them is, that I'm taking a closer look on both (all?) sides of web development. Which includes working with and learning more about backend technologies.

My first contact with everything else than frontend was in a project were we worked with NodeJS/Express and MongoDB.

This granted me a lof ot knowledge on how all parts of a web application work together. From the frontend, to API Calls, middlewares, services, raw SQL and to the database.

In the project I'm working in right now, we're using go in the backend and therefore I'm learning go!

And to make the most of it I will document everything I learn about go in this blog post. So I have a place to come back to and look at when I forget everything.

And maybe you can learn something from it too!

So...go. What is it?

Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software.

At least that's what it says about itself on its website. Let's see what wikipeda has to say about go:

Go is a statically typed, compiled programming language designed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. Go is syntactically similar to C, but with memory safety, garbage collection, structural typing, and CSP-style concurrency. The language is often referred to as Golang because of its domain name, golang.org ↗ Opens in new tab, but the proper name is Go.

Ah that tells a bit more about it. Interesting! Now that we are behind the get to know each other phase, let's see what topics I'll cover in this blog post. As the title says it will be an absolute beginner introduction.

If I'm wrong about something or made mistakes, please let me know!

What you can learn from this blog post:

• packages, import, export
• Variables
• Functions
• Data types
• for
• if, else
• switch
• struct
• arrays
• slices
• range
• map
• method
• pointers
• pointer receivers
• interfaces
• errors

packages, import, export

Every go program is made up of packages. You always have to have a main package, where your app starts. You can import your own packages or one of the hundreds of go packages.

A name (of a function, struct etc) is exported and therefore can be imported if it begins with a capital letter.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"math"
)

// is not exported
func main () {
	PrintStr()
}

// can be imported from other packages in your app
func PrintStr () {
	fmt.Printf("Hello World")
	fmt.Println(math.Pi)
}

Variables

There are several ways to declare variables in go. The classic var lets you declare one or more variables at once. The const lets you declare constant variables. The := shorthand lets you declare and initialize a variable at once inside a function.

var a = 10
const 1 = 10

// shorthand for declaring and initializing a a variable inside a function
a := 10

Functions

A function in go can take zero or more arguments. The type of the input parameter comes after the variable name. When the parameters have the same type you can combine the type declaration.

The input parameters are followed by the return type.

A function can return any number of results. In go explizit returns are required.

func multiply (a, b int) int {
	return a * b
}

multiply(3, 6)

Data types

Surprise, surprise go has values like boolean, strings and integer. Here's a list of all of them.

bool

string

int  int8  int16  int32  int64
uint uint8 uint16 uint32 uint64 uintptr

byte // alias for uint8

rune // alias for int32
     // represents a Unicode code point

float32 float64

complex64 complex128

Variables declared without an initial value are given their zero value:

• 0 for numeric types,
• false for the boolean type, and
• "" (the empty string) for strings

for

Coming from TypeScript, there is no such thing as the array methods map, reduce or filter in go. The for loop is all you have.

A for loop consists of the following:

• an init statement; condition expression; post statement

There is no need for parenthesis surrounding the three components. The init and post statements are optional.

The for loop can also be used as while().

var a = 10

for i := 0; i < a; i++ {
	a += i
}

if, else

If, else is pretty straight forward in go. No parenthesis are needing surrounding the condition.

var a = 10

if a > 9 {
	fmt.Println(a)
}

switch

A switch in go only runs the selected case, not all cases that follow. The default case is optional.

The break statement is provided automatically.

You can combine expressions in the same case by using comma separation.

switch time.Now().Weekday() {
    case time.Saturday, time.Sunday:
        fmt.Println("It's the weekend")
    default:
        fmt.Println("It's a weekday")
}

struct

A struct is a typed collection of fields. Structs are mutable.

type server struct {
	host          string
	port          string
}
server{"localhost", "8080"}

type person struct {
	name string
	age int
}
person{name: "Marco", age: 29}

arrays

Arrays are numbered sequences of elements of a specific length.

The following creates a variable a as an array of 10 integers.

var a [10]int

In go arrays can not be resized, because the length is part of the type.

The built-in len method returns the length of an array.

var names [3]string{"Tim", "Mandy", "Stefanie"}
len(names) // 2

slices

Unlike arrays, slices have no specified length, so they are dynamically sized. They are build on arrays but are more powerful and therefore more used than arrays in go.

To create dynamically sized arrays (slices), you can use the make function.

// slice of type in with length 5
a := make([]int, 5)

// slice of type string with length 3
s := make([]string, 3)

Slices can also be build by slicing an existing array or slice. In the following example, a slice is formed on the numbers array by specifying two indices, a low and high bound.

// array
numbers := [5]int{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}

// slice of numbers array
specificNumbers := names[0:3]

Its also possible to create slices of slices.

board := [][]string{
		[]string{"_", "_", "_"},
		[]string{"_", "_", "_"},
		[]string{"_", "_", "_"},
	}

To enhance a slice, you can use the append function. This is one example of what makes slices more powerful than arrays. Append returns a slice with one or more new values.

var s []int

append(s, 1, 3, 4, 5)

Slices can also be copied.

s := make([]string, 5)

s[0] = "H"
s[1] = "e"
s[2] = "l"
s[3] = "l"
s[4] = "o"

c := make([]string, 5)

copy(c, s)

map

A map is combination of key value pairs. In other languages it's often called dictionary.

// creates an empty map of string - int key - value pairs
m := make(map[string]int)

// sets an the key "age" with the value of 29
m["age"] = 29

// deletes an element of a map
delete(m, "age")

range

To iterate over a map or a slice you can use range.

It returns two values: index and a copy of the element at that index.

The index or value can be skipped by using _

numbers := []int{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}

for i, num := range numbers {
	fmt.Printf(i, num)
}

method

A method is a function with a special receiver argument.

type Server struct {
	host          string
	port          string
}

function (s Server) printServer() {
	fmt.Printf(s)
}

See that we pass the Server as s as a receiver argument to the printServer function before we the function name declaration?

Everything inside the function body has now access to the members of the struct.

pointers

Pointers hold the memory address of a value.

i := 42

// generate a pointer to i
p = &i

// read i through the pointer p
fmt.Prinln(*p)

pointer receivers

Methods can be declared with pointer receivers.

The differences between pointer receivers and value receivers are:

• pointer receivers can modify the value to which the receiver points
• with pointer receivers you can avoid copying the value on each method call
• sending the value of the variable to the function, but not the variable itself
• the value of the variable isn’t passed to the function, just its location
• pointers are adresses to a particular place in memory

type Server struct {
	host          string
	port          string
}

function (s *Server) printServer() {
	fmt.Printf(s)
}

Pointers and pointer receivers are little bit more advanced topic but it's good to have heard of them as a beginner.

interfaces

Interfaces are named collections of method signatures. To implement an interface you just need to implement all methods in the interface.

type interface {
	methodOne() int
	methodTwo() int
}

func methodOne() int {}

func methodTwo() int {}

errors

A nil value in the error position indicates that there was no error.

if err != nil {
	// log the error
}

Calling code should handle errors by testing whether the error equals nil.

And that is it, these are the programming with go beginner topics I came across the last weeks and months while learning and working with go. I hope you like it!

Did you know everything already or did you learn something new? Do you have other great examples? Let me know!

You can send me an email ↗ Opens in new tab or message me on Twitter ↗ Opens in new tab.

Resources:

• https://gobyexample.com/ ↗ Opens in new tab
• https://blog.golang.org/slices-intro ↗ Opens in new tab

I hope you enjoyed this post and learned something new. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me via Email ↗ Opens in new tab.

If you want to support me, you can buy me a coffee. I would be very happy about it!

I wish you a wonderful day! Marco