<\/span><\/h3>\nWhen you start learning a new programming language, you can usually find a lot of \u201chello-world\u201d tutorials, beginner guides, and books with details on the main language concepts, syntax, and even the standard library. However, getting information on such things as the layout of major data structures that the language runtime allocates or what assembly code is generated when you call a built-in function is not that easy. Obviously, the answers lie inside the source code, but, from our own experience, you can spend hours wandering through it without making much progress. The goal of this article is to demonstrate how you can decipher Go sources on your own.<\/p>\n
Before we can begin, we certainly need our own copy of the Go source files. There is nothing special in getting them. Just execute the command below.<\/p>\n
git clone https:\/\/github.com\/golang\/go<\/a><\/pre>\nPlease note that the code in the main branch is being constantly changed, so we use the release-branch.go1.4<\/code> branch in this blog post.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/span>Understanding a project structure<\/span><\/h3>\nIf you look at the \/src<\/code> folder of the Go repository, you can see a lot of folders. Most of them contain source files of the standard Go library. The standard naming conventions are always applied here, so each package is inside a folder with a name that directly corresponds to the package name. Apart from the standard library, there is a lot of other stuff. In our opinion, the most important and useful folders are listed in the table below.<\/p>\n
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