Go Programming/Getting Started

Hello World

Let's start with a simple example, the venerable hello world program.

package main

import "fmt"

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

As you can see there is a lot going on here. The first line:

package main

starts every go source file. It states which package this file belongs to. Think of a package as a bag of code, where you are going to stuff the internals of your programs into. The main package is special, and will we get into that in a moment.

import "fmt"

The line declares all the packages (or bags of code others have written to help us do things — also known as libraries) we are going to use. In this case, we are going to use the fmt (the format package: pronounced fa-umpt) Again, in later sections, we will delve deeper into packages.

func main(){
…
}

Here we declare a function (```func```). A function is a set of instructions that we provide to the computer to get it to do what we want it to do. There are few special functions in go, and that function is the entry point of the program.