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

Chapter 2

  1.  Which filesystem is used by modern operating systems?
    Modern operating systems use different filesystems: Windows and macOS use their respective proprietary formats, NTFS and APFS, while Linux systems mainly use EXT4.
  2. What is an inode? What is inode 0 in Unix?
    An inode is a filesystem data structure representing a file. It stores information about a file, excluding the name and data.
    The inode 0 is reserved for the / folder.
  3. What's the difference between PID and PPID?
    PID is the unique identifier for an existing process, while PPID is the identifier of the parent process. When an existing process creates another, the new process has a PPID equal to the existing process's PID.
  4. How do you terminate a process running in the background?
    While a SIGINT signal can be sent to a foreground process by pressing Ctrl + C, for a background process...