Golang

Intro

We all know Golang has been in his prime for about 5yrs and picking it up is a good choice after a long ride with Python Picking Golang was not an easy task for me or anyone coming from a dynamically typed language though I had an ideal basic of C but was poised with Golang or Rust Pitching myself to go with Golang and let see how rough the terrain is……

Basics

I noticed something don't know if it's good but Golang really go down with 0 and 1. The way the strings are represented in byte (integer)

For context

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hello, World"[1])
}

which returns 101 instead of e in case of Python

Another thing is about variable declaration with const and var but what caught my attention is assigning a variable which can be done in two ways

var x = 10
or
x := 10

Day One (Hit the ground running....)

Golang error handling is top-notch NGL….. Noticed that the time it takes to run a go file for the first time is usually much longer than the repeated rerun and one of my suspicions is that as a compiled language Golang makes it pattern behavior of C which you have to compile it into a.out file before you can run a program, this cost some secs but I’m still not impressed with the execution time maybe I will find out along the way or it’s my windows machine that is ditching the speed

Control Stucture

At least I'm aware of if, for etc from the past but the edge i discover with Golang is the switch case, oh....I love the switch the case when I'm working with C one of the flaws in Python (thou all language tries to solve a particular problem but then create some flaw). The control syntax was a replica of javascript for i := 1; i < 10; i++ i can use some of my Js knowledge here too

Writing Golang is perfect and the simplicity is top-notch, and for demo purpose I built a fizz-buzz

Arrays, Slices & Maps

Arrays are the list of numbered sequences stored in a single typed with a fixed length just like List[] in Python

Slice is a little bit complicated... it is a segment of an array(indexable and have a flexible length) Go has a built-in function of slices: append and copy which both go by their name one works by appending to the end of a slice and the other copy and takes dst & src arguments. All entries in src are copied into dst overwriting it and taking the length into consideration _(if the length of two slices are not the same the smallest one will be used)

Context

func main() {
    slice1 := []int{1,2,3}
    slice2 := make([]int,2)
    copy(slice2, slice1)
    fmt.Println(slice1, slice2)
}

Output: slice1 = [1,2,3]
            slice2 = [1,2]

Maps is an unordered collection of key-value pair (technically overwhelming i still haven't get the hang of it) ...perharps this should have me on a firm grip

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
  x := []int{
    42,96,86,68,
    57,82,63,70,
    37,34,83,27,
    19,97,9,17,
  }

  smallest := x[0]

  for _, value := range x {
    if value < smallest {
      smallest = value
    }
  }
  fmt.Println("The smallest value is",smallest)
}