Mastering Go: Unleashing the Power of Golang

Go, often referred to as Golang, is a statically typed, compiled programming language designed by Google. It was created to be efficient, readable, and productive for building reliable and scalable software systems. Go was developed with a focus on simplicity, performance, and concurrency.

What are the advantages of Go?

Some of the key advantages of Go:

• It executes fast
• Garbage collection
• Simpler object-oriented features: No inheritance, no constructors, no generics
• Efficient concurrency
  • Management of task execution through Goroutines
  • Communication between tasks through Channels
  • Synchronization between tasks through Select

Go folder structure

The top level of a Golang project is called a Workspace, this is the directory where all the Go files are stored. A common organization of the folder structure is recommended to enhance sharing. The following 3 subfolders are recommended for a workspace:

• src: Contains the source code files
• pkg: Contains libraries
• bin: Contains the compiled executables

What is the Garbage collection in Golang?

Garbage collection is a set of different methods that handle the deallocation of objects that are no longer in use to recycle memory.

What does the “go” tool do?

The go tool is a command line tool used to perform several tasks in Go. These are some of its common uses:

• go build: Compiles the program and creates an executable for the main package
• go doc: Prints the documentation for a package
• go fmt: Formats source code files
• go get: Downloads packages and install them
• go list: Lists all installed packages
• go run: Compiles and runs the executable
• go test: Runs tests using files ending in _test.go

How do you work with pointers in Golang?

A pointer is an address to data stored in memory. The & operator can be used to get the address of a variable or function, and the * operator can be used to return the data stored at that address.

What is a tagless switch in Golang?

A tagless switch is a construct that enables switch statements to be used as an alternative of long if-else statements. It’s named tagless because instead of the usual tag on the case it contains a conditional. Here’s an example:

switch {
	case x > 1:
		fmt.PrintF(“case1”)
	case x < -1:
		fmt.PrintF(“case2”)
	default:
		fmt.PrintF(“no match”)
}

When passing a struct as the argument on a function, which are good reasons to pass a pointer instead of the struct itself?

• The struct is very large, so passing the struct itself would create an entire copy in memory
• The function needs to modify the structure

References

• Official documentation: https://go.dev/doc/