Hands-On System Programming with Go

Explore the fundamentals of systems programming starting from kernel API and filesystem to network programming and process communications

Key Features

• Learn how to write Unix and Linux system code in Golang v1.12
• Perform inter-process communication using pipes, message queues, shared memory, and semaphores
• Explore modern Go features such as goroutines and channels that facilitate systems programming

Book Description

System software and applications were largely created using low-level languages such as C or C++. Go is a modern language that combines simplicity, concurrency, and performance, making it a good alternative for building system applications for Linux and macOS.

This Go book introduces Unix and systems programming to help you understand the components the OS has to offer, ranging from the kernel API to the filesystem, and familiarize yourself with Go and its specifications. You'll also learn how to optimize input and output operations with files and streams of data, which are useful tools in building pseudo terminal applications. You'll gain insights into how processes communicate with each other, and learn about processes and daemon control using signals, pipes, and exit codes. This book will also enable you to understand how to use network communication using various protocols, including TCP and HTTP.

As you advance, you'll focus on Go's best feature-concurrency helping you handle communication with channels and goroutines, other concurrency tools to synchronize shared resources, and the context package to write elegant applications.

By the end of this book, you will have learned how to build concurrent system applications using Go

What you will learn

• Explore concepts of system programming using Go and concurrency
• Gain insights into Golang's internals, memory models and allocation
• Familiarize yourself with the filesystem and IO streams in general
• Handle and control processes and daemons' lifetime via signals and pipes
• Communicate with other applications effectively using a network
• Use various encoding formats to serialize complex data structures
• Become well-versed in concurrency with channels, goroutines, and sync
• Use concurrency patterns to build robust and performant system applications

Who this book is for

If you are a developer who wants to learn system programming with Go, this book is for you. Although no knowledge of Unix and Linux system programming is necessary, intermediate knowledge of Go will help you understand the concepts covered in the book

Table of Contents

1. An Introduction to System Programming
2. Unix OS Components
3. An Overview of Go
4. Working with the Filesystem
5. Handling Streams
6. Building Pseudo-Terminals
7. Handling Processes and Daemons
8. Exit Codes, Signals, and Pipes
9. Network Programming
10. Data Encoding Using Go
11. Dealing with Channels and Goroutines
12. Synchronization with sync and atomic
13. Coordination Using Context
14. Implementing Concurrency Patterns
15. Using Reflection
16. Using CGO

Alex Guerrieri is a software developer who specializes in backend and distributed systems. Go has been his favorite tool for the job since first using it in 2013. He holds a degree in computer science engineering and has been working in the field for more than 6 years. Originally from Italy, where he completed his studies and started his career as a full-stack developer, he now lives in Spain, where he previously worked in two start-ups-source{d} and Cabify. He is now working for three companies-as a software crafter for BBVA, one of the biggest Spanish banks; as a software architect for Security First, London, a company focusing on digital and physical security; and as a cofounder of DauMau, the company behind Vidsey, software that generates videos in a procedural manner.