Book Image

Mastering Go - Second Edition

By : Mihalis Tsoukalos
Book Image

Mastering Go - Second Edition

By: Mihalis Tsoukalos

Overview of this book

Often referred to (incorrectly) as Golang, Go is the high-performance systems language of the future. Mastering Go, Second Edition helps you become a productive expert Go programmer, building and improving on the groundbreaking first edition. Mastering Go, Second Edition shows how to put Go to work on real production systems. For programmers who already know the Go language basics, this book provides examples, patterns, and clear explanations to help you deeply understand Go’s capabilities and apply them in your programming work. The book covers the nuances of Go, with in-depth guides on types and structures, packages, concurrency, network programming, compiler design, optimization, and more. Each chapter ends with exercises and resources to fully embed your new knowledge. This second edition includes a completely new chapter on machine learning in Go, guiding you from the foundation statistics techniques through simple regression and clustering to classification, neural networks, and anomaly detection. Other chapters are expanded to cover using Go with Docker and Kubernetes, Git, WebAssembly, JSON, and more. If you take the Go programming language seriously, the second edition of this book is an essential guide on expert techniques.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

The syscall package

This section will present a small portion of the functionality of the syscall standard Go package. Note that the syscall package offers a plethora of functions and types related to low-level operating system primitives. Additionally, the syscall package is extensively used by other Go packages, such as os, net, and time, which all provide a portable interface to the operating system. This means that the syscall package is not the most portable package in the Go library – that is not its job.

Although UNIX systems have many similarities, they also exhibit various differences, especially when we talk about their system internals. The job of the syscall package is to deal with all of these incompatibilities as gently as possible. The fact that this is not a secret and is well documented makes syscall a successful package.

Strictly speaking, a system call...