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)

Interfaces

Interfaces are an advanced Go feature, which means that you might not want to use them in your programs if you are not feeling very comfortable with Go. However, interfaces can be very practical when developing big Go programs, which is the main reason for talking about interfaces in this book.

But first, I will talk about methods, which are functions with a special receiver argument. You declare methods as ordinary functions with an additional parameter that appears just before the function name. This particular parameter connects the function to the type of that extra parameter. As a result, that parameter is called the receiver of the method. You will see such functions in a while.

Put simply, interfaces are abstract types that define a set of functions that need to be implemented so that a type can be considered an instance of the interface. When this happens, we...