Tutorial: How to install the Google GO compiler on Ubuntu Linux
Jeremy Morgan 
Nov 14, 2009 - 2 min read
Last Update: Mar 25, 2023
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This week google introduced “go”, their new programming language. I was curious so I started messing around with it. Here’s how you can try it out if you’d like to “give it a go”.
About Google Go
From the Google Go Homepage:
No major systems language has emerged in over a decade, but over that time the computing landscape has changed tremendously. There are several trends:
- Computers are enormously quicker but software development is not faster.
- Dependency management is a big part of software development today but the “header files” of languages in the C tradition are antithetical to clean dependency analysis - and fast compilation.
- There is a growing rebellion against cumbersome type systems like those of Java and C++, pushing people towards dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript.
- Some fundamental concepts such as garbage collection and parallel computation are not well supported by popular systems languages.
- The emergence of multicore computers has generated worry and confusion.
We believe it’s worth trying again with a new language, a concurrent, garbage-collected language with fast compilation.
So I decided to install the GO compiler, so I could play around with it. I found it to be a little different than the instructions.
Step 1: edit your .bashrc and add these lines:
export GOROOT=$HOME/go
export GOARCH=386
export GOOS=linux
export GOBIN=$HOME/bin
export PATH=$GOBIN:$PATH
The last two are not listed on the GO site, but I needed them to compile.
Step 2. Create a bin folder
mkdir ~/bin
chmod 755 ~/bin
This was also not included in the instructions, this is so quietgcc has a place to sit, and be run by the installer.
Step 3. Run the following commands:
sudo apt-get install python-setuptools python-dev
sudo apt-get install mercurial
hg clone -r release https://go.googlecode.com/hg/ $GOROOT
This will pull down the latest copy of go. Next, you’ll need the libraries to build go:
sudo apt-get install bison gcc libc6-dev ed make
Step 4: Build and install
cd $GOROOT/src
./all.bash
If all goes well, you’ll see this screen:
{% img center https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/jeremymorgan/hosted/how-to-install-google-go.jpg How to Install Google Go %}
I am using Ubuntu Linux, Karmic Koala with GCC 4.4.1
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me!
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