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)

About file input and output

File input and output includes everything that has to do with reading the data of a file and writing the desired data to a file. There is not a single operating system that does not offer support for files and therefore for file input and output.

As this chapter is pretty big, I will stop talking and start showing you practical Go code that will make things clearer. So, the first thing that you will learn in this chapter is byte slices, which are very important in applications that are concerned with file input and output.

Byte slices

Byte slices are a kind of slices used for file reading and writing. Putting it simply, they are slices of bytes used as a buffer during file reading and writing operations...