Chapter 1. Getting into Go
This chapter covers
- Introducing Go
- Understanding where Go fits into the language landscape
- Getting up and running in Go
The way we build and run software is changing. Innovation has swept in, disrupting long-standing assumptions about the computing environments that software runs in. To fully take advantage of these innovations, you need languages and tools that support them at their core.
When most mainstream programming languages and supporting toolchains were developed, they were designed for single-core processing. That’s what we had. Now desktop computers, servers, and even our phones have processors with multiple cores. Running software with operations taking place concurrently can happen anywhere.
Toolchains around building applications have changed. Increased functionality and complexity in software requires environments that can build and execute the code rapidly and efficiently. Testing larger and more complicated codebases needs to happen quickly so it doesn’t become a development blocker. Many applications are developed using libraries. Libraries and their versions are managed differently, thanks to solutions to disk-space problems that hampered this in the past.