Installing Go

Go is an open source project written originally in C, which means we can compile our own version from the code easily; this remains the best option for installing Go for a variety of reasons. It allows us to navigate through the source if we need to look something up later, either in the standard library Go code, or in the C code of the tools. It also allows us to easily update to newer versions of Go or experiment with release candidates as they come out, just by pulling a different tag or branch from the code repository and building again. Of course, we can also easily roll back to earlier versions if we need to, and even fix bugs and generate pull requests to send to the Go core team for them to consider contributions to the project.

Note

A continually updated resource for installing Go from its source on a variety of platforms can be found online at http://golang.org/doc/install/source or by searching for Install Golang from source. This chapter will cover the same things...