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 went through some terminology, in order to understand why modern Terminal applications exist and how they evolved. 

Then, we focused on how to implement a basic pseudo-terminal. The first step was to create a loop that handled input management, then it was necessary to create a command selector and finally an executor. The selector could choose between a series of functions defined in the package, and we created a special command to exit the application. With some refactoring, we went from functions to structs containing both the name and action.

We saw how to improve the application in various ways. First, we created a support for multiline input (using a custom split function for a scanner) that supported quoted strings, with new lines. Then, we created some tools to add colored output to our functions and used them in one of the commands...