Running Go Code

We now need to know how to execute hw.go or any other Go application. There are two ways to execute Go code:

• As a compiled language using go build.

• As a scripting language using go run.

So, let’s find out more about these two ways of running Go code.

Compiling Go code

In order to compile Go code and create a binary executable file, we need to use the go build command. What go build does is create an executable file for us to distribute and execute manually. This means that the go build command requires an additional step for running our code.

The generated executable is automatically named after the source code file name without the .go file extension. Therefore, because of the hw.go source file, the executable will be called hw. In case this is not what we want, go build supports the -o option, which allows us ...