Installing Google's Go Language on Ubuntu

GO language promoted by google is a new system programming language said to be expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected. The language is still very young and there is no ready made package available for ubuntu. You can install it and try out the features from the version control repository of go .

Let us see how you can do this. I did it on ubuntu 9.04.

1) Install Pre-requisites on ubuntu.

You need gcc and some supporting software like bison to compile go. Install the following.

 $ sudo apt-get install bison gcc libc6-dev ed.

The go repository uses mercurial version controls system .
Install mercurial with the following command.

$ apt-get install mercurial

2 Set up the environment variables.

I am assuming that you are planning to install go under a folder
named go in your home directory.

In my case it is /home/fermi/go

Create it with
$mkdir go

Now create another direcory inside go .

$ mkdir go/bin

The above directory will contain your go compiler.
Next, you have to set u several variables.

$ export  GOROOT=/home/fermi/go/hg
$ export  GOOS=linux
$ export  GOARCH=386
$ export  GOBIN=/home/fermi/go/bin

( Note: You need not create the folder hg. You can also add the above
four lines along with the PATH variable below to the .bashrc file
if you are planning  to use go regularly.)

Update your PATH variable .

$ export PATH=$PATH:$GOBIN
Check the environment variables with.
 $ env | grep '^GO'
I got like this.

GOBIN=/home/fermi/go/bin/
GOARCH=386
GOROOT=/home/fermi/go/hg
GOOS=linux

3) Grab the source code from mercurial

$hg clone -r release https://go.googlecode.com/hg/ $GOROOT 

It created  /home/fermi/go/hg and downloaded several files to  it.
To build the Go distribution run.

4) Compile Go

$ cd $GOROOT/src
$ ./all.bash

Now wait for some time. The compilations will proceed and will be
completed with the following message

--- cd ../test
N known bugs; 0 unexpected bugs

5) Test go
Your go language system is ready to go.:D
Now let us write a hello world program and test it.

Create the following program in your favourite editor and save it as hello.go

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
fmt.Printf("hello, world\n")
}

To compile hello.go run.
 $ 8g hello.go
The above command produced and intermediate file hello.8.
Next you have to link it.
$ 8l hello.8

The executable is placed as 8.out. Finally run the executable.
$./8.out