Getting Started with Go and Unix Systems Programming

An operating system is the kind of software that allows you to communicate with the hardware, which means that you cannot use your hardware without an operating system. Unix is an operating system with many variants that have many things in common including their programming interface.

The Unix operating system was mainly programmed in C and not entirely in the assembly language, which makes it portable to other computer architectures without having to rewrite everything from scratch. It is important to understand that even if you are developing a Go program on a Unix machine, at the end of the day, your code will be translated to C functions and system calls because this is the only way to directly communicate with the Unix kernel. The main benefits you get from writing Go code instead of C code are smaller programs with less silly bugs. You will learn more about this in Chapter 3, Advanced Go Features.

As this book will use Go, you will need to have a version of Go installed on your Unix machine. The good news is that there is a port of the Go programming language for almost all modern Unix systems including macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD. There is also a Windows port of Go, but this book will not deal with Microsoft Windows.

Although there is a good chance that your Unix variant has a package for Go, you can also get Go from https://golang.org/dl/.

In this chapter, you will learn the following topics:

• Systems programming
• The advantages and disadvantages of Go
• The states of a Unix process
• Two Go tools: gofmt and godoc
• The features of the latest Go version (1.8)