Huffman coding is a widely-used algorithm for lossless data compression. By assigning variable-length codes to an input string’s characters, it ensures that the most frequently seen characters have shorter codes, while less frequently seen characters have longer codes. This technique minimizes the overall size of the data to be transmitted or stored. In this blog […]

This is the second part of a three-part series discussing the Go proverbs that were devised by Rob Pike. (The original post is available to read, if you haven’t already. UPDATE: And the third and final post is now available to read too.) gofmt’s Style Is No One’s Favourite, Yet gofmt Is Everyone’s Favourite The […]

Go is widely known for its simplicity, concurrency model and performance in large-scale distributed systems. But when it comes to machine learning (ML), the most dominant programming languages have traditionally been Python, R and C++. These languages have become almost synonymous with machine learning due to the wide range of mature libraries, frameworks and communities […]

Testing should be considered an essential part of the software-development process, because it helps to ensure that our code works as expected when handling a wide range of reasonable values as input. So today we are going to look at how to write tests in Go, using the built-in syntax, and how to run the […]

I know it sounds like a funky dance move, but the Knuth shuffle is actually an elegant method for randomly rearranging the elements in an array — or, as we Gophers tend to prefer, a slice. The algorithm is very easy to understand and implement, which means that you should be able to use it […]

We spend a lot of time on this blog thinking about things like syntax and code style, or building example projects, but today I want to zoom out and look at Go programming from a bigger perspective. Who Uses Go in Real-World Applications? Since Go is one of the most popular languages being used in […]

It may be surprising to learn that two Go structs can contain exactly the same fields and yet one can require more — or less — memory than the other. Since we generally want to ensure that we never use more memory than required, we are going to look at a technique called structure packing […]

Most programs will need to emit some kind of output if they’re going to be useful to the people using them. So today we will look at the various ways to print content to the console in Go, focusing on four related functions in particular. Introducing the Fmt Package The Go standard library’s functions for […]