The Easiest Way to Use Go from Source
Recently I saw someone suggest using the unreleased version of Go, without the magically easy way to do it. Here’s how.
First you need to install some version of Go. Use the version packaged with
your Linux distribution; or if you are using OSX or RUNNING_IN_HELL use
the officially packaged, latest release. Next you need
to install gotip:
go get golang.org/dl/gotip
After that you need to tell it to install the current latest version:
gotip download
The above command takes a while; it downloads and installs everything you need
and builds the latest unreleased version of go, called tip (like how the
latest unreleased perl is called blead.)
After running the above command you can use gotip as if it were go. For
example, if you ran it now you could see docs for the new errors package:
$ gotip doc errors
package errors // import "errors"
Package errors implements functions to manipulate errors.
func As(err error, target interface{}) bool
func Is(err, target error) bool
func New(text string) error
func Opaque(err error) error
func Unwrap(err error) error
type Formatter interface{ ... }
type Frame struct{ ... }
func Caller(skip int) Frame
type Printer interface{ ... }
type Wrapper interface{ ... }
And you’d use gotip build, gotip test, and all the other stuff you are used
to using with the go tool.
If interested, you can do the same thing for each version of go; see the docs
here. I don’t know why I don’t see this
mentioned more often. In the future I’m going to stop extracting the tarball
and exclusively download this way and just create a ~/bin/go symlink to the
latest version.
If you are interested in learning Go, this is my recommendation:
(The following includes affiliate links.)
If you don’t already know Go, you should definitely check out
The Go Programming Language
Another book to consider learning Go with is
Go Programming Blueprints
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