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 […]

I’m going to show you a little snippet of syntax today that even many experienced Go programmers may not be aware exists, which involves performing an operation on an array or slice with the use of three different indices. We’ll look in more detail at this special syntax that’s used in a slice-indexing operation below. […]

This post is the start of an upcoming three-part series that will explain nineteen Go proverbs. In this context, the word “proverb” is just used as a fancier term for a “short, snappy saying”. The proverbs that we’ll be discussing come from a talk given by Rob Pike in the early days of Go. Rob […]

Not all years are of the same length — some are shorter or longer than others — so if you’re writing code that deals with dates and durations, it may be important to take account of this. What Is a Leap Year? In the Gregorian calendar, a leap year has 366 days, whereas other years […]

Installing the Go programming language for the first time is really easy, regardless of what operating system or processor architecture your computer is running. It’s particularly straightforward to install Go on Windows or MacOS machines, but Linux users won’t find the process unnecessarily difficult either, especially if they’re using a package manager. Where to Find […]