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)

Process management

Go is not that good at dealing with processes and process management in general. Nevertheless, this section will present a small Go program that lists all the processes of a Unix machine by executing a Unix command and getting its output. The name of the program will be listProcess.go. It works on both Linux and macOS systems, and will be presented in three parts.

The first part of the program is the following:

package main 
 
import ( 
   "fmt" 
   "os" 
   "os/exec" 
   "syscall" 
) 

The second part of listProcess.go has the following Go code:

func main() { 
 
   PS, err := exec.LookPath("ps") 
   if err != nil { 
         fmt.Println(err) 
   } 
fmt.Println(PS) 
 
   command := []string{"ps", "-a", "-x"} 
   env := os.Environ() 
   err = syscall.Exec(PS, command, env) 

As you...