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 introduced the concept of streams for describing incoming and outgoing flows of data. We saw that the reader interface represents the data received, while the writer is the sent data.

We compared the different readers that are available in the standard package. We looked at files in the previous chapter, and in this one we added byte and string readers to the list. We learned how to implement custom readers with an example, and saw that it's always good to design a reader to be built on top of another.

Then, we focused on writers. We discovered that files are also writers if opened correctly and that there are several writers in the standard package, including the byte buffer and the string builder. We also implemented a custom writer and saw how to handle bytes and runes with the utf8 package.

Finally, we explored the remaining functionality...