GOing into the deep end with Go

Terrible pun, sorry-not-sorry.

This weekend I decided to make the jump and start learning golang. I haven’t really done much with a compiled language since college (not counting Java, even though it’s compiled to byte-code).

Below are some things I discovered while setting up my environment, using VS Code for developing:

If you’re using a Mac, make sure you have xcode installed as well as the command-line tools (xcode-select --install). I had them installed previously, but since upgrading to Mojave I didn’t reinstall some tools. Not doing this will give you this error: could not launch process: stub exited while attempting to connect: signal: illegal instruction
Follow the standard practice in Go by creating a centralized go directory and creating a GOPATH environment variable. For me, I did $HOME/dev/go for my GOPATH and added this to my .bash_profile
With VSCode, install the Go plugin and create a simple go file, like so:

package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
    fmt.Println("hello world")
}

With your simple code, you should see a little pop-up to install Golang tooling for VSCode. Tell VSCode to install everything.
From the Command Palette, run Go: Install/Update Tools and select dlv for updating.
Finally, go back to the Command Palette and run Debug: Open launch.json. This should create a basic debugger profile

At this point, you should have a working environment to start learning Go. Hope this helps!

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