Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with Go

By : Alex Guerrieri
Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with Go

By: Alex Guerrieri

Overview of this book

System software and applications were largely created using low-level languages such as C or C++. Go is a modern language that combines simplicity, concurrency, and performance, making it a good alternative for building system applications for Linux and macOS. This Go book introduces Unix and systems programming to help you understand the components the OS has to offer, ranging from the kernel API to the filesystem. You'll then familiarize yourself with Go and its specifications. You'll also learn how to optimize input and output operations with files and streams of data, which are useful tools in building pseudo-terminal applications. You'll gain insights into how processes communicate with each other, and learn about processes and daemon control using signals, pipes, and exit codes. This book will also enable you to understand how to use network communication using various protocols, including TCP and HTTP. As you advance, you'll focus on Go's best feature - concurrency, which will help you handle communication with channels and goroutines, other concurrency tools to synchronize shared resources, and the context package to write elegant applications. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to build concurrent system applications using Go
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: An Introduction to System Programming and Go
5
Section 2: Advanced File I/O Operations
9
Section 3: Understanding Process Communication
14
Section 4: Deep Dive into Concurrency
19
Section 5: A Guide to Using Reflection and CGO

Summary

In this chapter, we explored the encoding methods offered by the Go standard package and third-party libraries. They can be divided into two main categories. The first is the textual-based encoding methods, which are easy to read and write for both human and machines. However, they have more overhead and tend to be much slower than their counterpart, binary-based encoding. Binary-based encoding methods have little overhead but are not human readable.

In text-based encoding, we find JSON, XML, and YAML. The first two are handled by the standard library, the last needs an external dependency. We explored how Go allows us to specify structure tags to change the default encoding and decoding behaviors, and how to use these tags in these operations. Then, we checked and implemented the interfaces that define custom behavior during the marshal and unmarshal operations....