Go programming language is a relatively new programming language that is open-source and backed by the software giant Google. It is designed to make programming easier and more efficient. It is available for Windows, Linux and macOS.
The GO language has been intentionally designed to have a fast learning curve. If you have previous programming experience, then you will probably learn everything about Go programming in just 1 day. Even for the beginners, it should not take more than a week to start feeling comfortable with Go programming.
We can setup our Windows PC for development with Go programming language in just two steps:
Step 1. Installing Go binaries on Windows PC
First of all, we have to download and install Go binaries on our system. Go binaries include the compiler, debugger and other necessary programs. Google has made it extremely easy as we can just get the installer packages and run them to finish the job. you can get all the packages for all the supported systems from https://golang.org/dl/. The installer automatically adds the binary folder to the PATH variable.
Step 2. Installing IDE for Go programming
Having installed all the Go binaries on the system, we need an IDE for making our life easy for programming with Go. There are many so many IDE’s available for Go programming but the one that keeps everything simple and easy is open-source LiteIDE.
We can download LiteIDE from http://liteide.org/en/ and extract the contents of the downloaded ZIP or a folder. The program does not require any installation, we can run is in portable mode. LiteIDE can automatically detect the path where Go binaries are kept.
We can try loading a simple “Hello World” program in LiteIDE and run it from the toolbar. It also comes with a terminal built inside from where we can give Go commands manually.