Advanced Go Features

In the previous chapter, you learned how to compile Go code, how to get input from the user and print the output on the screen, how to create your own Go functions, the data structures that Go supports, and how to process command-line arguments.

This chapter will discuss many fascinating things, so you better prepare yourselves for lots of interesting and practical Go code that will help you perform many different yet really important tasks, starting with error handling and ending with how to avoid some common Go mistakes. If you are familiar with Go, you can skip what you already know, but please do not skip the proposed exercises.

So, this chapter will talk about some advanced Go features, including:

• Error handling
• Error logging
• Pattern matching and regular expressions
• Reflection
• How to use the strace(1) and dtrace(1) tools to watch the system calls of Go executable files
• How to detect unreachable Go code
• How to avoid various common Go mistakes