Go (Golang) Programming – Install and Run in 6 Minutes

Go is a modern generalpurpose programming language launched by Google in 2009. It is powerful but has a fairly simple syntax. And in this video, I'll show you how to get up and running with an editor and a debugger and the Go system all ready to go, so to speak. First, download and install Go. Go to go.dev and you'll find the download links there for whichever operating system you're using. I'm going to download the installer for Windows. And here it it's downloading. When it's ready, I just click it to open it. And now it's just a question of going through the installation. I'll just do a quick check to make sure it's all been installed properly on Windows. I just start the start menu, open the command prompt. And now I can check that Go is found and go space version. And that command will show me that Go is there. And it shows me the version number. how to get Visual Studio Code the editor. So, I go to code.visisualstudio.com, click download. I've got a choice of downloads for different operating systems. I just want the Windows one. So, I'm going to uh you can see it's already started. And when that downloads, I'm going to go again through the installation. Very straightforward. I won't bore you by taking through the whole installation. I just click the file to open it and start us uh the installation in the usual manner. In order to have dedicated support for Go programming, I need to add the Go language extension. So I do that by clicking this little blocky icon over here. And that lets me pick extensions for various different languages. Just enter Go in the search bar up here. And there it finds my Go extension. I will click install. Yes, I trust the publisher and install. And wait a little while. And that installs the extension. Right, I'm ready to start some programming. So in Visual Studio, I click this explorer icon up here. It prompts me to open a folder. I have already created a folder on disk for my Go programs called Go Tests. So I select that. There's nothing in there at the moment. There soon will be. I click this icon to add a file. I'm going to create a main.go file. main.go. This is the entry point of my program. And now I need to put it in a package. Don't worry too much about that because I'm just going to call it package main and um write some code. So funk main and in here I'm putting some fmt is a package that contains various functions to print strings and so on. Print lind to print a line and uh it imports the fmt package. I need that import statement there. And in between here, I'm just going to put hello world in uh oops in uh double quotes. Crl S to save it. Now I need to do a bit of setup down here. The command I need for that is go mod init. And then the name of my application. I'm going to call it test app. Don't worry too much about this. This is just needed for setup of the package. And that's all done in the terminal down here. And now I'm ready to run my program. So I need to enter the command uh go space run. Then the name of my main file main. I've only got one file of course at the moment. Go runs it. And there you are. Hello world. So that's my first Go program. I'd like to be able to debug and run by pressing Ctrl F5 to run or F5 to debug. Let me try that now. Okay. They say this is not available. So let's install that support. When that finishes installing, I can now go into the editor and I can put a break point, for example, on this line here. And I can now press F5 and it will run the debugger. And it stops at the break point. And I could examine any variables. Were there any variables in this program and look at the output in the debug console. There's a lot more to be said about running and debugging and configuring Visual Studio Code, which I may get round to later, but that is the basics of your environment, all set up for you to start coding in Go in Visual Studio Code. And finally, if you want to run and debug in the same way as you would in Microsoft's other IDE, Visual Studio, not Visual Studio Code, but Visual Studio for C, C, and C++, and so on, go to the project folder that you set up and find launch.js. Uh, this contains configuration information. You can just edit it and literally edit its contents to what I have here. And now you can and here I press Ctrl F5 and you see it runs it in the terminal and we just press this hello world and F5 as before for the debugger. I've put the contents of the uh launch file launch.json as a comment under this video. So if you just want to copy it and paste it, that's the easiest way to do it. Be sure to subscribe to my channel. I'll be back shortly with more Go programming lessons in more depth. In the meantime, if you can't wait to get your hands on with some interesting programming, go to my channel page. I have tutorials, hundreds, literally hundreds of tutorials on C, Java, Pascal, Small Talk, lots and lots of different programming languages as well as subjects such as recursion, pointers, and even a very long and I think quite interesting course in writing adventure games. So, see you soon.

Go is a great, easy-to-use, general-purpose, cross-platform programming language. But how do you get all the software installed to edit, run and debug Go programs? Easy! In this short video I show you all the steps you need to install the Go (Golang) tools, the powerful free Visual Studio Code editor plus Go programming support for slick editing and debugging. The suggested entries for the file launch.json (mentioned in the video): { "version": "0.2.0", "configurations": [ { "name": "Launch Package", "type": "go", "request": "launch", "mode": "auto", "program": "${fileDirname}", "console": "integratedTerminal" } ] } MORE LESSONS ============= I have hundreds of videos and even complete programming courses on my YouTube channel. They cover everything from low-level programming in C to coding an adventure game in C# or Java. I cover languages as varied as Ruby, Object Pascal and Smalltalk. No matter what your programming level or area of expertise, I’m sure you’ll find something to interest you. Go to my Playlists and Courses pages and browse around: https://www.youtube.com/CodeWithHuw/playlists Be sure to subscribe to the Code With Huw channel so that you get a notification when I upload more lessons in this series. PROGRAMMING BOOKS ==================== If you want to learn programming in more depth (and also support this channel!) you might think of buying one of my books. I have written books on C programming, Using Pointers in C, Delphi, Ruby, Recursion and other programming topics. You can buy my books (paperback or Kindle) on Amazon. *** The Little Book Of Pointers *** Amazon (US) https://amzn.to/2LF2aVb Amazon (UK) https://amzn.to/2FViSvS *** The Little Book Of C Programming *** Amazon (US) https://amzn.to/2RXwA6a Amazon (UK) https://amzn.to/2JhlwOA “CODE WITH HUW” ON TWITTER: ================================= https://twitter.com/codewithhuw “CODE WITH HUW” ON FACEBOOK: ================================= https://www.facebook.com/CodeWithHuw Good luck! And good programming!