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)

Using command-line arguments

Command-line arguments allow your programs to get input, such as the names of the files you want to process, without having to write a different version of the program. Hence, you cannot create any useful systems software if you're unable to process the command-line arguments passed to it.

So here is a naive Go program, named cla.go, that prints all its command-line arguments, including the name of the executable file:

package main 
 
import "fmt" 
import "os" 
 
func main() { 
   arguments := os.Args 
   for i := 0; i < len(arguments); i++ { 
         fmt.Println(arguments[i]) 
   } 
} 

As you can see, Go needs an extra package named os in order to read the command-line arguments of a program that are stored in the os.Args array. In case you do not like having multiple import statements, you can rewrite the two import statements...