Book Image

Go: Design Patterns for Real-World Projects

By : Vladimir Vivien, Mario Castro Contreras, Mat Ryer
Book Image

Go: Design Patterns for Real-World Projects

By: Vladimir Vivien, Mario Castro Contreras, Mat Ryer

Overview of this book

The Go programming language has firmly established itself as a favorite for building complex and scalable system applications. Go offers a direct and practical approach to programming that lets programmers write correct and predictable code using concurrency idioms and a full-featured standard library. This practical guide is full of real-world examples to help you get started with Go in no time at all. You’ll start by understanding the fundamentals of Go, then get a detailed description of the Go data types, program structures, and Maps. After that, you’ll learn how to use Go concurrency idioms to avoid pitfalls and create programs that are exact in expected behavior. Next, you will get familiar with the tools and libraries that are available in Go to write and exercise tests, benchmarking, and code coverage. After that, you will be able to utilize some of the most important features of GO such as Network Programming and OS integration to build efficient applications. Then you’ll start applying your skills to build some amazing projects in Go. You will learn to develop high-quality command-line tools that utilize the powerful shell capabilities and perform well using Go’s built-in concurrency mechanisms. Scale, performance, and high availability lie at the heart of our projects, and the lessons learned throughout the sections will arm you with everything you need to build world-class solutions. You will get a feel for app deployment using Docker and Google App Engine. Each project could form the basis of a start-up, which means they are directly applicable to modern software markets. With these skills in hand, you will be able to conquer all your fears of application development and go on to build large, robust and succinct apps in Go. This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products: 1. Learning Go Programming 2. Go Design Patterns 3. Go Programming Blueprints, Second Edition
Table of Contents (38 chapters)
Go: Design Patterns for Real-World Projects
Credits
Preface
Bibliography

Go types


To help launch the conversation about types, let us take a peek at the types available. Go implements a simple type system that provides programmers direct control over how memory is allocated and laid out. When a program declares a variable, two things must take place:

  • The variable must receive a type

  • The variable will also be bound to a value (even when none is assigned)

This allows the type system to allocate the number of bytes necessary to store the declared value. The memory layout for declared variables maps directly to their declared types. There is no type boxing or automatic type conversion that takes place. The space you expect to be allocated is actually what gets reserved in memory.

To demonstrate this fact, the following program uses a special package called unsafe to circumvent the type system and extract memory size information for declared variables. It is important to note that this is purely illustrative as most programs do not commonly make use of the unsafe package...