Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with Go

By : Alex Guerrieri
Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with Go

By: Alex Guerrieri

Overview of this book

System software and applications were largely created using low-level languages such as C or C++. Go is a modern language that combines simplicity, concurrency, and performance, making it a good alternative for building system applications for Linux and macOS. This Go book introduces Unix and systems programming to help you understand the components the OS has to offer, ranging from the kernel API to the filesystem. You'll then familiarize yourself with Go and its specifications. You'll also learn how to optimize input and output operations with files and streams of data, which are useful tools in building pseudo-terminal applications. You'll gain insights into how processes communicate with each other, and learn about processes and daemon control using signals, pipes, and exit codes. This book will also enable you to understand how to use network communication using various protocols, including TCP and HTTP. As you advance, you'll focus on Go's best feature - concurrency, which will help you handle communication with channels and goroutines, other concurrency tools to synchronize shared resources, and the context package to write elegant applications. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to build concurrent system applications using Go
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: An Introduction to System Programming and Go
5
Section 2: Advanced File I/O Operations
9
Section 3: Understanding Process Communication
14
Section 4: Deep Dive into Concurrency
19
Section 5: A Guide to Using Reflection and CGO

Working with structs

After seeing how slices work, we will know how to handle complex data in C and Go using structures. For this, let's see the following sections.

Structures in Go

Go structures use a technique called alignment, which consists of adding one or more bytes to data structures to make it fit into memory addresses better. Consider the following data structure:

struct {
a string
b bool
c []byte
}

With 64-bit architecture calling unsafe.Sizeof on this structure, this will give us an unexpected result. What we are expecting is the following:

  • 16 bytes from the string; 8 for the pointer to the first element, and 8 for the length
  • 1 byte for the Boolean
  • 24 for the slice; 8 for the address, 8 for...