Documentation

The Go programming language is an open source project to make programmers more productive.

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

Getting started

Installing Go

Instructions for downloading and installing Go.

Tutorial: Getting started

A brief Hello, World tutorial to get started. Learn a bit about Go code, tools, packages, and modules.

Tutorial: Create a module

A tutorial of short topics introducing functions, error handling, arrays, maps, unit testing, and compiling.

Writing Web Applications

Building a simple web application.

How to write Go code

This doc explains how to develop a simple set of Go packages inside a module, and it shows how to use the go command to build and test packages.

A Tour of Go

An interactive introduction to Go in three sections. The first section covers basic syntax and data structures; the second discusses methods and interfaces; and the third introduces Go's concurrency primitives. Each section concludes with a few exercises so you can practice what you've learned. You can install it locally with:

$ go get golang.org/x/tour

This will place the tour binary in your workspace's bin directory.

Using and understanding Go

Effective Go

A document that gives tips for writing clear, idiomatic Go code. A must read for any new Go programmer. It augments the tour and the language specification, both of which should be read first.

Editor plugins and IDEs

A document that summarizes commonly used editor plugins and IDEs with Go support.

Diagnostics

Summarizes tools and methodologies to diagnose problems in Go programs.

Managing dependencies

When your code uses external packages, those packages (distributed as modules) become dependencies.

Developing modules

Developing and publishing modules

You can collect related packages into modules, then publish the modules for other developers to use. This topic gives an overview of developing and publishing modules.

Module release and versioning workflow

When you develop modules for use by other developers, you can follow a workflow that helps ensure a reliable, consistent experience for developers using the module. This topic describes the high-level steps in that workflow.

Managing module source

When you're developing modules to publish for others to use, you can help ensure that your modules are easier for other developers to use by following the repository conventions described in this topic.

Developing a major version update

A major version update can be very disruptive to your module's users because it includes breaking changes and represents a new module. Learn more in this topic.

Publishing a module

When you want to make a module available for other developers, you publish it so that it's visible to Go tools. Once you've published the module, developers importing its packages will be able to resolve a dependency on the module by running commands such as go get.

Module version numbering

A module's developer uses each part of a module's version number to signal the version’s stability and backward compatibility. For each new release, a module's release version number specifically reflects the nature of the module's changes since the preceding release.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Answers to common questions about Go.

References

Package Documentation

The documentation for the Go standard library.

Command Documentation

The documentation for the Go tools.

Language Specification

The official Go Language specification.

Go Modules Reference

A detailed reference manual for Go's dependency management system.

go.mod file reference

Reference for the directives included in a go.mod file.

The Go Memory Model

A document that specifies the conditions under which reads of a variable in one goroutine can be guaranteed to observe values produced by writes to the same variable in a different goroutine.

Release History

A summary of the changes between Go releases.

Codewalks

Guided tours of Go programs.

• First-Class Functions in Go
• Generating arbitrary text: a Markov chain algorithm
• Share Memory by Communicating

Tools

• About the Go command - why we wrote it, what it is, what it's not, and how to use it.
• Debugging Go Code with GDB
• Data Race Detector - a manual for the data race detector.
• A Quick Guide to Go's Assembler - an introduction to the assembler used by Go.

Wiki

The Go Wiki, maintained by the Go community, includes articles about the Go language, tools, and other resources.

See the Learn page at the Wiki for more Go learning resources.

Non-English Documentation

See the NonEnglish page at the Wiki for localized documentation.