Hi, friends in this post, you will learn how to install Go on FreeBSD 12. This popular programming language is gaining more and more followers every day.
Go is an open source (BSD license) programming language that was born with the objective of allowing the creation of efficient and easily distributable applications. So, it has binaries for Windows, Mac OS and of course, for Linux.
One of the main features of Go is the efficiency with which it manages computer resources. To the extent that many claims to be the natural replacement of C.
On the other hand, Go is a compiled language and has a garbage collector that tries to reduce the latency to the minimum guaranteeing optimal performance.
For this and many other reasons is that more and more developers have it as their main language.
Install Go language on FreeBSD 12
One of the main advantages of FreeBSD is that it has a large number of packages available from the official repositories. However, not all of them are up-to-date.
So in this post, we will download and install the latest stable version of Go which is 1.14.
First, open a terminal session. Once you have it open, you need to install curl to download Go.
:~$ sudo pkg install curl Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue... FreeBSD repository is up to date. All repositories are up to date. The following 2 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked): New packages to be INSTALLED: curl: 7.67.0 ca_root_nss: 3.50 Number of packages to be installed: 2 The process will require 4 MiB more space. 1 MiB to be downloaded. Proceed with this action? [y/N]: y
Once you have installed curl, we can start the download of Go with the following command:
:~$ curl https://dl.google.com/go/go1.14.freebsd-amd64.tar.gz --output go.tar.gz
When the download is finished we have to unzip it and move it to the /usr/local/ directory
:~$ tar xvf go.tar.gz :~$ sudo mv go /usr/local
Go is ready for action, but it is convenient to make it available globally in our terminal. To do this, you have to edit the profile file.
:~$ sudo nano ~/.profile
And add the following content at the end:
export GOROOT=/usr/local/go export GOPATH=$HOME/work/ export PATH=$GOPATH/bin:$GOROOT/bin:$PATH
I’ll explain something quickly. The second line refers to a folder called “work” in that folder is where we have to include all our Go projects. Of course, you can replace the name “work” with whatever you want.
Save the changes and close the file.
Now you can see the version of Go installed with the following command:
:~$ go version go version go1.14 freebsd/amd64
This indicates that Go is available from the console no matter where the prompt is located.
Testing Go
Now that Go is installed, let’s do the classic Hello World program to check that everything is okay.
First, we’ll create the project folders. Remember that it will be inside the work folder. Inside it, the project folder and inside it, the src folder where we will create the source file.
:~$ mkdir -p $HOME/work/src/hello
Then, create the source file and add the following content
:~$ nano ~/work/src/hello/hello.go
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Printf("hello, world\n")
}
Finally, we build the project, compile the source code and execute it:
:~$ go build hello :~$ go install hello :~$ hello hello, world
So, Go is ready to use.
Conclusion
There are many programming languages but there is always room for innovation and that is what Go gives us. An efficient language and with the support of a giant like Google.
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