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

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at some of the history of Go and its current pros and cons. After understanding the namespace by looking at how the package system and imports work, we explored its type system with basic, composite, and user-defined types.

We focused on variables by looking at how they can be declared and initialized, which operations are allowed between types, how to cast variables to other types, and how to see what the underlying type of interface is. We saw how scope and shadowing work and the difference between constants and variables. After this, we jumped into functions, a first-class type, and how each signature represents a different type. We then understood how methods are basically functions in disguise and attached to a type that allows custom types to satisfy interfaces.

In addition, we learned how to control the application flow using statements...