Book Image

Go Systems Programming

Book Image

Go Systems Programming

Overview of this book

Go is the new systems programming language for Linux and Unix systems. It is also the language in which some of the most prominent cloud-level systems have been written, such as Docker. Where C programmers used to rule, Go programmers are in demand to write highly optimized systems programming code. Created by some of the original designers of C and Unix, Go expands the systems programmers toolkit and adds a mature, clear programming language. Traditional system applications become easier to write since pointers are not relevant and garbage collection has taken away the most problematic area for low-level systems code: memory management. This book opens up the world of high-performance Unix system applications to the beginning Go programmer. It does not get stuck on single systems or even system types, but tries to expand the original teachings from Unix system level programming to all types of servers, the cloud, and the web.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Developing wc(1) in Go

The principal idea behind the code of the wc.go program is that you can read a text file line by line until there is nothing left to read. For each line you read, you find out the number of characters and the number of words it has. As you need to read your input line by line, the use of bufio is preferred instead of the plain io because it simplifies the code. However, trying to implement wc.go on your own using io would be a very educational exercise.

But first, you will see that the wc(1) utility generates the following output:

$ wc wc.go cp.go
      68     160    1231 wc.go
      45     112     755 cp.go
     113     272    1986 total

So, if wc(1) has to process more than one file, it automatically generates summary information.

In Chapter 9, Goroutines - Basic Features, you will learn how to create a version of wc.go using Go routines. However, the...