Syntax and Basic Structure

🍿 Hello World

To start, let's dive into the most popular program in programming: "Hello, World." This will allow us to explore the syntax and the basic structure of Go code and learn how to run a program.

"Hello, World" is a simple program that displays a greeting message on the screen. Let me provide you with the code and guide you through the steps to execute it.

Here's the Golang code to print "Hello, World" on the screen:

main.go

package main

import "fmt"

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

Now, let's break down the structure of the code.

🍿 The "main" package

package main

• In Go, every program starts with a package declaration (we'll cover packages later). In this case, we've declared the "main" package.

• The "main" package is special in Golang as it indicates that this is the program's main entry point.

🍿 Importing the "fmt" package

import "fmt"

• Next, we import the "fmt" package, which provides functions (we'll talk about functions later) for input and output formatting. We'll use the "Println" function from this package to display our message on the screen.

🍿 The "main" function

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

• In Golang, the "main" function serves as the entry point for the execution of the program. When you run a Golang program, the runtime system automatically starts by invoking the main function.

• It's the primary function that kicks off the execution and performs the initial setup for your program.

• Inside the "main" function, we call the "Println" function and pass the message "Hello, World" as an argument.

• The "Println" function will print the message on the screen.

🍿 Run the program

Now that we've written our code, let's execute the program. Make sure you have Golang installed on your system. Open your terminal or command prompt and navigate to the directory where you've saved the file containing the code.

To run the program, run the following command:

go run main.go

After running the command, you should see the message "Hello, World" printed on the screen.

Hello, World

Congratulations! You've successfully executed your first program in Go.