A Gopher's Guide to *NIX Plumbing - Eleanor McHugh

Are you writing Go programs that run on Linux or MacOS? Then you're writing Go programs for a UNIX environment! But how much does that figure in your daily experience?

This talk provides an introduction to programming for the UNIX environment using Go.

We'll start with the premise of an operating system kernel, the program which manages a UNIX system’s computing resources. This will lead to discussion of memory management, file handles and pipes, before building into more advanced topics around process coordination and privileges, interprocess communication, networking, and concurrency.

On a UNIX system many facilities we think of as part of the operating system are provided by third-party libraries written in languages such as C or Rust. Whilst this is a deep topic with many quirks, we’ll finish up with a gentle introduction to CGO, the Go tool for incorporating C code into our programs. With CGO we’re able to access a wealth of pre-existing functionality, whether that be direct access to LIBC’s malloc() function or creating a wrapper for a database engine like SQLite.

By the end of this talk you should have a broad overview of the UNIX environment from a programmer’s perspective, which of its facilities are directly accessible from Go’s standard library, and how to access those which aren’t from CGO.

The focus throughout will be on code examples, building from simple beginnings to more advanced use cases, to provide a springboard for further exploration.

Eleanor Mchugh returns for another riveting talk at GopherCon UK 2025, held on the 14-15th August.

#gopherconuk #golang #goprogramming #golanguage #unix #linux #softwaredevelopment #opensource