Running Go code

You now need to know how to execute hw.go or any other Go application. As will be explained in the two subsections that follow, there are two ways to execute Go code: as a compiled language using go build or as a scripting language using go run. So, let us 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, you need to use the go build command. What go build does is create an executable file for you to distribute and execute manually. This means that the go build command requires an additional step for running your code.

The generated executable is automatically named after the source code filename 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 you want, go build supports the -o option, which allows you to change the filename and the path of the generated executable file. As an...