Installing a binary distribution
of the gc compiler
Getting Started
Introduction
Go is an open source project with a BSD-style license. There are two official Go compiler toolchains: the
gc
Go compiler and the gccgo
compiler that is part of the GNU C Compiler (GCC).
The
gc
compiler is the more mature and well-tested of the two. This page is about installing a binary distribution of the gc
compiler.
For information about installing the
gc
compiler from source, see Installing Go from source. For information about installing gccgo
, see Setting up and using gccgo.Download the Go tools
Visit the Go project's downloads page and select the binary distribution that matches your operating system and processor architecture.
Official binary distributions are available for the FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X (Snow Leopard/Lion), and Windows operating systems and the 32-bit (
386
) and 64-bit (amd64
) x86 processor architectures.
If a binary distribution is not available for your OS/arch combination you may want to try installing from source or installing gccgo instead of gc.
Install the Go tools
The Go binary distributions assume they will be installed in
/usr/local/go
(or c:\Go
under Windows), but it is possible to install them in a different location. If you do this, you will need to set the GOROOT
environment variable to that directory when using the Go tools.
For example, if you installed Go to your home directory you should add the following commands to
$HOME/.profile
:export GOROOT=$HOME/go export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT/bin
Windows users should read the section about setting environment variables under Windows.
Windows
The Go project provides two installation options for Windows users (besides installing from source): a zip archive that requires you to set some environment variables and an experimental MSI installer that configures your installation automatically.
Zip archive
Extract the zip file to the directory of your choice (we suggest
c:\Go
).
If you chose a directory other than
c:\Go
, you must set the GOROOT
environment variable to your chosen path.
Add the
bin
subdirectory of your Go root (for example, c:\Go\bin
) to to your PATH
environment variable.MSI installer (experimental)
Open the MSI file and follow the prompts to install the Go tools. By default, the installer puts the Go distribution in
c:\Go
.
The installer should put the
c:\Go\bin
directory in your PATH
environment variable. You may need to restart any open command prompts for the change to take effect.Setting environment variables under Windows
Under Windows, you may set environment variables through the "Environment Variables" button on the "Advanced" tab of the "System" control panel. Some versions of Windows provide this control panel through the "Advanced System Settings" option inside the "System" control panel.
Test your installation
Check that Go is installed correctly by building a simple program, as follows.
Create a file named
hello.go
and put the following program in it:package main import "fmt" func main() { fmt.Printf("hello, world\n") }
Then run it with the
go
tool:$ go run hello.go hello, world
If you see the "hello, world" message then your Go installation is working.
What's next
Start by taking A Tour of Go.
For more detail about the process of building and testing Go programs read How to Write Go Code.
Build a web application by following the Wiki Tutorial.
Read Effective Go to learn about writing idiomatic Go code.
For the full story, consult Go's extensive documentation.
Subscribe to the golang-announce mailing list to be notified when a new stable version of Go is released.
Community resources
For real-time help, there may be users or developers on
#go-nuts
on the Freenode IRC server.
The official mailing list for discussion of the Go language is Go Nuts.
Bugs should be reported using the Go issue tracker.
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