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)

A small web server

Enough with the web clients: in this section, you will learn how to develop web servers in Go!

The Go code for the implementation of a naive web server can be found in webServer.go, and this will be presented in four parts; the first part is the following:

package main 
 
import ( 
   "fmt" 
   "net/http" 
   "os" 
) 

The second part is where things start to get tricky and strange:

func myHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) { 
   fmt.Fprintf(w, "Serving: %s\n", r.URL.Path) 
   fmt.Printf("Served: %s\n", r.Host) 
} 

This is a kind of function that handles HTTP requests: the function takes two arguments, a http.ResponseWriter variable and a pointer to an http.Request variable. The first argument will be used for constructing the HTTP response, whereas the http.Request variable holds the details of the...