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)

Unix pipes in Go

We first talked about pipes in Chapter 6, File Input and Output. Pipes have two serious limitations: first, they usually communicate in one direction, and second, they can only be used between processes that have a common ancestor.

The general idea behind pipes is that if you do not have a file to process, you should wait to get your input from standard input. Similarly, if you are not told to save your output to a file, you should write your output to standard output, either for the user to see it or for another program to process it. As a result, pipes can be used for streaming data between two processes without creating any temporary files.

This section will present some simple utilities written in Go that use Unix pipes for clarity.

Reading from standard input

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