Go - northwood-labs/macos-for-development GitHub Wiki

Go

Go (sometimes called Golang) is a fast, compiled, garbage-collected, functional programming language. It has built-in support for concurrency and asynchronous programming, and can cross-compile easily to multiple operating systems and CPU architectures.

It is a remarkably stable language, and upgrades tend to be quite uneventful (this is a good thing). It is a “batteries-included” environment with compiling, testing, fuzzing, profiling, and dependency management all built-in.

Unless there is a specific bug in the latest release that we want to avoid (quite rare), we should always plan to run the latest release.

Install the Go toolchain.
```
brew install go
```
Add $GOPATH/bin to your $PATH environment variable. By default (i.e., without configuration), $GOPATH is defined as $HOME/go.
```
export PATH="$PATH:$GOPATH/bin"
```

Version management

Generally speaking, always run the latest release. Having said that, there is occasionally a case where software needs to be updated for the latest release (usually a .0 release), and that hasn't happened yet, so we need to roll back.

Managing Go installations

Go has a built-in way of installing a specific version of Go. This approach results in a go binary with the version in the name.

go install golang.org/dl/go1.22.7@latest
go1.22.7 download
go1.22.7 version

If you are wrapping your Go calls in a Makefile, you can redefine $(GO) with:

GO=$(shell which go1.22.7)

Goenv

goenv is a port from pyenv, and they work nearly identically.

Install goenv.
```
brew install goenv
```
Add eval "$(goenv init -)" to your profile.
Restart your shell.
Install a specific Go version and set it to the default for this project.
```
goenv install 1.22.7
goenv rehash
goenv local 1.22.7
goenv version
```

Package management

Go modules

go mod init {URL}
go get entgo.io/ent@latest
go mod tidy