01 - Introduction to Go

Why start to code in Go in 2026

Go exist since 2009 and is always evolving. There are a lot of useful programs written in Go like Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, CockroachDB and more.

Interested applications to build

• Desktop app (AppImage) with wails, better than Electron?
• A Go backend for Wayland and Quickshell which returns all the information you need, saves user preferences, etc…
• Microservices, gRPC, API, Prometheus, Grafana, etc…
• Command line applications with cobra or viper

There are a ton of libraries that help to interact with GNU/Linux like sys/unix, procfs.

Configure your shell

if command -v go >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    export GOBIN=$(go env GOPATH)/bin
    PATH="$PATH:$(go env GOBIN):$(go env GOPATH)/bin"
fi

With this in place, all the dependencies we need will be installed properly.

Change directory

Create a new directory to start coding

mkdir first-app
cd first-app

Generate the go.mod

go mod init hello_world

Output

go: creating new go.mod: module hello_world
go: to add module requirements and sums:
go mod tidy

Every Go program has a go.mod in the root directory. It’s like a package.json for Node.js or a Gemfile for Ruby.

Don’t edit the go.mod yourself; instead use go get or go mod tidy to update dependencies.

You can also use a Git repository as a source like:

go mod init github.com/YOUR-NAME/hello

But we will see that later.

First app

Create a new file hello.go

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hello World");
}

The package main should always be present with the func main() {}. The import is used to list all your dependencies and external libraries.

Build and run your app

go build
./hello_world

The name of the app matches with the module name in the go.mod.

You can also just run go run hello.go which compiles and runs when you want to execute only one program.

Look for Documentation

Need information about a function, package. Use go doc

go doc fmt.Printf
go doc fmt

If go doc is not available for you, install it with go install golang.org/x/tools/cmd/godoc@latest