Go

Go is a statically-typed language with syntax loosely derived from that of C, adding garbage collected memory management, type safety, some dynamic-typing capabilities, additional built-in types such as variable-length arrays and key-value maps, and a large standard library.

Installation

The standard Go compiler is go, which can be installed from the go package. The go command also include various tooling such as go get, go doc, etc. An alternative is , which is a Go frontend for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). In some cases may do better optimisations. When in doubt: use go.

An additional package that most Go developers will want to install is go-tools. This will provide various commonly used tools which will make working with Go easier, such as , , , etc.

Test your installation

You can check that Go is installed correctly by building a simple program, as follows:

hello.go

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hello, Arch!")
}

Then run it with the go tool:

Compilation with standard gc compiler (same as go build -compiler=gc hello.go):

$ go build hello.go

Compilation with gccgo (same as ):

$ gccgo hello.go -o hello

$GOPATH

Go expects the source code to live inside , which is set to by default.

Create that workspace:

$ mkdir -p ~/go/src

The directory is used to store the sources of the packages. When compiling Go will also create for executables and to cache individual packages. You will probably want to add ~/go/bin to the environment variable to run installed Go:

export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/go/bin"

Run for more information.

Cross compiling to other platforms

The go command can natively cross-compile to a number of platforms.

If cgo is not required for your build, then simply specify the target OS and architecture as env vars to :

$ GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm64 go build .

See the official documentation for the valid combinations of and $GOARCH.

On the other hand, if cgo is required for your build, you have to provide the path to your cross-compilers, via the env vars.

Say you want to cross-compile for and .

You need first to install the aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc cross-compiler.

Here is a sample program that requires , so that we can test the cross-compilation process:

$ cat > hello.go <<EOF
package main

// #include <stdio.h>
// void hello() {  puts("Hello, Arch!"); }
import "C"

func main() { C.hello() }
EOF

Then, you can cross-compile it like this:

$ GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm64 CGO_ENABLED=1 CC=/usr/bin/aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc go build hello.go

You can check that the architecture of the generated binary is actually :

$ file hello
hello: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, ARM aarch64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux-aarch64.so.1, BuildID[sha1]=b1d92ae8840a019f36cc2aee4606b6ae4a581bf1, for GNU/Linux 3.7.0, not stripped

If you copy to a suitable host, you can test-run it:

[alarm@rpi3 ~]$ uname -a
Linux alarm 5.3.8-1-ARCH #1 SMP Tue Oct 29 19:31:23 MDT 2019 aarch64 GNU/Linux
[alarm@arpi3 ~]$ ./hello
Hello, Arch!

Troubleshooting

Jetbrains Go Plugin

If you are using a Jetbrains IDE and the Go plugin cannot find your Go SDK path, you might be using an incompatible package. Remove the package and replace it with go. If your is set, the IDE should now be able to find your Go SDK at .

Go