How to compile and run a Go program
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This tutorial continues what we did in how to create your first Go program.
Open a terminal in the hello
folder and run the program using
go run hello.go
Our program ran successfully, and it printed “Hello, World!” to the terminal!
The go run
tool first compiles and then runs the program specified.
You can create a binary using go build
:
go build hello.go
This will create a hello
file that’s a binary you can execute:
In the introduction I mentioned Go is portable.
Now you can distribute this binary and everyone can run the program as-is, because the binary is already packaged for execution.
The program will run on the same architecture we built it on.
We can create a different binary for a different architecture using the GOOS
and GOARCH
environment variables, like this:
GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 go build hello.go
This will create a hello.exe
executable for 64-bit Windows machines:
Setup for 64-bit macOS (Intel or Apple Silicon) is GOOS=darwin GOARCH=amd64
and Linux is GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64
.
This is one of the best features of Go.
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