Getting Started with Go and Unix Systems Programming

What is systems programming ?

System programming is a special area of programming on Unix machines.

You can group the various areas of systems software and related system calls in the following sets:

• File I/O
• Advanced file I/O
• System files and configuration
• Files and directories
• Process control
• Threads
• Server processes
• Interprocess communication
• Signal processing
• Network programming

Learning systems programming

The only way you can learn systems programming is by developing your own utilities using this book as a reference and a tutorial.

About Go

Go is a modern generic purpose open source programming language that officially announced at the end of 2009.

Spiritual fathers: Robert Griesemer , Ken Thomson, asn Rob Pike , who designed Go as a language for professional programmers who want to build reliable and robust software.

Getting ready for Go

Find your version of Go using this command:

[maxwell@MaxwellDBA ~]$ 
[maxwell@MaxwellDBA ~]$ go version
go version go1.10.3 gccgo (GCC) 8.5.0 20210514 (Red Hat 8.5.0-15) linux/amd64
[maxwell@MaxwellDBA ~]$ 
[maxwell@MaxwellDBA ~]$ 

[maxwell@MaxwellDBA ~]$ vi hello.go
[maxwell@MaxwellDBA ~]$ ls -ltr
total 12
-rw-rw-r-- 1 maxwell maxwell  16 Oct 10 12:47 banzhang.txt
-rwxrwxr-x 1 maxwell maxwell 265 Oct 11 07:14 maxwell_test.sh
drwxrwxr-x 5 maxwell maxwell 276 Oct 12 21:50 datas
drwxrwxr-x 3 maxwell maxwell  52 Oct 14 15:51 software
drwxr-xr-x 4 maxwell maxwell 125 Oct 14 17:05 datasets
drwxrwxr-x 5 maxwell maxwell 146 Nov 15 20:10 shelllearning
drwxrwxr-x 2 maxwell maxwell  18 Nov 15 20:53 20221115_shelllearning
-rw-rw-r-- 1 maxwell maxwell 119 Dec  7 20:55 hello.go
[maxwell@MaxwellDBA ~]$ go run hello.go
Hello World!
[maxwell@MaxwellDBA ~]$ cat hello.go
package main
 import "fmt"
  // This is a demonstrative comment! 
  func main() {
     fmt.Println("Hello World!")
  }
[maxwell@MaxwellDBA ~]$ 

Two useful Go tools

The two most useful of them are gofmt and godoc.

you can find more information about gofmt : https://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/

The following is a poorly formatted version of the hw.go program that is hard to read and understand.

[maxwell@MaxwellDBA goproject]$ cat unglyHW.go
package main

import
   "fmt"

// This is a demonstrative comment!
        func main(){
 fmt.Println("Hello World!" )
}
[maxwell@MaxwellDBA goproject]

Processing the previous code , which is saved as unglyHW.go with gofmt, generated the following easy to read and comprehend output:

[maxwell@MaxwellDBA goproject]$ gofmt unglyHW.go
package main

import "fmt"

// This is a demonstrative comment!
func main() {
        fmt.Println("Hello World!")
}
[maxwell@MaxwellDBA goproject]$ 

Note: Remembering that the gofmt utility does not automatically save the generated outputs is important , which means that you should either use the -w options followed by a valid filename or redirect the output of gofmt to a new file.

The godoc utility allows you to see the documentation of existing Go packages and functions. You can find more information about godoc at http://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/godoc

Advantages and disadvantages of Go

The list of the Go Strong features includes the following:

• easy to read and easy to understand
• The Go compiler is there to help you to print warning and error meesage that help you solve the actual problem.
• portable
• modern programming language
• support for procedural,concurrent,and distributed programming.
• support Garbage Collection(GC)
• does not have a preprocessor and does high-speed compilation.
• build web application
• uses static linking by default. which means that the produced binary files can be easily transferred.
• go can be used from the command line.
• Go keeps concepts orthogonal

The list of Go disadvantages includes the following:

• does not have direct support for object-oriented programming.

The various states of a Unix process