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.

Tutorial: Getting started with multi-module workspaces

Introduces the basics of creating and using multi-module workspaces in Go. Multi-module workspaces are useful for making changes across multiple modules.

Tutorial: Developing a RESTful API with Go and Gin

Introduces the basics of writing a RESTful web service API with Go and the Gin Web Framework.

Tutorial: Getting started with generics

With generics, you can declare and use functions or types that are written to work with any of a set of types provided by calling code.

Tutorial: Getting started with fuzzing

Fuzzing can generate inputs to your tests that can catch edge cases and security issues that you may have missed.

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 take the tour online or install it locally with: 

$ go install golang.org/x/website/tour@latest

This will place the tour binary in your GOPATH'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.

A Guide to the Go Garbage Collector

A document that describes how Go manages memory, and how to make the most of it.

Managing dependencies

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

Fuzzing

Main documentation page for Go fuzzing.

Coverage for Go applications

Main documentation page for coverage testing of Go applications.

Profile-guided optimization

Main documentation page for profile-guided optimization (PGO) of Go applications.

Accessing databases

Tutorial: Accessing a relational database

Introduces the basics of accessing a relational database using Go and the database/sql package in the standard library.

Accessing relational databases

An overview of Go's data access features.

Opening a database handle

You use the Go database handle to execute database operations. Once you open a handle with database connection properties, the handle represents a connection pool it manages on your behalf.

Executing SQL statements that don't return data

For SQL operations that might change the database, including SQL INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE, you use Exec methods.

Querying for data

For SELECT statements that return data from a query, using the Query or QueryRow method.

Using prepared statements

Defining a prepared statement for repeated use can help your code run a bit faster by avoiding the overhead of re-creating the statement each time your code performs the database operation.

Executing transactions

sql.Tx exports methods representing transaction-specific semantics, including Commit and Rollback, as well as methods you use to perform common database operations.

Canceling in-progress database operations

Using context.Context, you can have your application's function calls and services stop working early and return an error when their processing is no longer needed.

Managing connections

For some advanced programs, you might need to tune connection pool parameters or work with connections explicitly.

Avoiding SQL injection risk

You can avoid an SQL injection risk by providing SQL parameter values as sql package function arguments

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.

Contribution Guide

Contributing to Go.

Release History

A summary of the changes between Go releases.

Codewalks

Guided tours of Go programs.

From the Go Blog

The official blog of the Go project, featuring news and in-depth articles by the Go team and guests.

Language

Packages

Modules

Tools

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.

Talks

A Video Tour of Go

Three things that make Go fast, fun, and productive: interfaces, reflection, and concurrency. Builds a toy web crawler to demonstrate these.

Code that grows with grace

One of Go's key design goals is code adaptability; that it should be easy to take a simple design and build upon it in a clean and natural way. In this talk Andrew Gerrand describes a simple "chat roulette" server that matches pairs of incoming TCP connections, and then use Go's concurrency mechanisms, interfaces, and standard library to extend it with a web interface and other features. While the function of the program changes dramatically, Go's flexibility preserves the original design as it grows.

Go Concurrency Patterns

Concurrency is the key to designing high performance network services. Go's concurrency primitives (goroutines and channels) provide a simple and efficient means of expressing concurrent execution. In this talk we see how tricky concurrency problems can be solved gracefully with simple Go code.

Advanced Go Concurrency Patterns

This talk expands on the Go Concurrency Patterns talk to dive deeper into Go's concurrency primitives.

More

See the Go Talks site and wiki page for more Go talks.

Non-English Documentation

See the NonEnglish page at the Wiki for localized documentation.