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)

Advanced Go Features

In the previous chapter, you learned how to compile Go code, how to get input from the user and print the output on the screen, how to create your own Go functions, the data structures that Go supports, and how to process command-line arguments.

This chapter will discuss many fascinating things, so you better prepare yourselves for lots of interesting and practical Go code that will help you perform many different yet really important tasks, starting with error handling and ending with how to avoid some common Go mistakes. If you are familiar with Go, you can skip what you already know, but please do not skip the proposed exercises.

So, this chapter will talk about some advanced Go features, including:

  • Error handling
  • Error logging
  • Pattern matching and regular expressions
  • Reflection
  • How to use the strace(1) and dtrace(1) tools to watch the system calls of...