An Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) is a tree representation of the structure of a piece of code used mainly in compilers. ASTs can also allow us to traverse existing code and use the information collected to auto-generate new code, which we are going to do in this post! The structor is a command line utility we are going to build that given a domain package with struct definitions it automatically generates getter and setter functions for the fields of the structs.
Arrays and Slices are two of the most common data structures you will ever use if you program in Go. They share a lot of properties as slices are ultimately build on top of arrays but also quite different.
A simple definition of Go routines is found the “Tour of Go” section about concurrency:
a Go routine is a lightweight thread managed by the Go runtime
Now if you have not come across threads before, threads is a way for a program to run parts of itself in some sort of concurrent way. In this post we are going to examine the differences between running a program sequentially, using Go routines and Wait Groups and we are going to talk about thread safe access to a data structure. So… Let’s get started 💪!
Continue reading “Go routines and thread safe data structures”
A lot of things in life are a matter of perspective and visibility and the same applies to variables in Go 😅. But what is a variable’s scope, how is it defined and what does it mean to shadow a variable in Go?
Let’s (very) loosely say that the scope of a variable declares where this variable is visible from ie. if we have declared a variable at the top of the file then it’s visible from within the entire code of that file.
We can go even deeper than that though and we can break this question down into Go specific terms.
Continue reading “Variable scopes and shadowing in Go”
Go has its own package for handing sorting – called “sort” but in this post we are going to use the Go language to implement a sorting algorithm called Bubble sort.
Problem definition: Given a slice of integers sort them in ascending order
Bubble sort is an iterative comparison algorithm that sorts the elements by swapping them around if they are out of order. If a larger element comes before a smaller one => swap them and move on to the next position of the array.
Continue reading “Sorting in Go using Bubble sort”
Since version 1.7 the Go testing package provides the ability to run some of the tests in parallel (well not entirely in parallel but that is another blog post 😉).
This is optional functionality you can enable by adding a single line of code t.Parallel() in your subtests. But how does that work exactly and what does Go actually do with these tests?
I find the way that strings have been implemented in Go to be really interesting but also a bit confusing when you are first introduced to them. Go has native UTF8 support, which flows through how the source code is written to how strings and “runes” are represented (runes is the thing that really got me by surprise but more on that later). So what does Go do differently with strings that is worth mentioning?
Continue reading “String manipulation in Go”
