Software Engineering

Stuff to install

We will be using Visual Studio Code (VSCode) as our editor, and we will be using the terminal to run our code. We also need Go (obviously, duh) and extensions for VSCode to make our lives easier.

Later on we will be using Git, Docker and Dagger, but install instructions for those follow in later sections and are not necessary for now.

You may know what Git is about, but Docker and Dagger are probably new to you. Don't worry, we will cover them in later lessons.





What you need to install

  • Visual Studio Code (latest version, 1.92.2)
  • Go (latest version, 1.23.3)
  • Git (latest version, 2.46.0)
  • Docker Engine (latest version, 27.1.1), can be installed with Docker Desktop (latest version, 4.33.0)
  • Dagger (latest version, 0.12.5)

Versions are as of writing this course (September 2024).

Using Homebrew for package management is recommended. You can install Homebrew by following the instructions here. Homebrew only works on MacOS and most Linux distributions.

Note: If you are running on Windows, using WSL2 is recommended. You can install it by following the instructions here. Ubuntu is recommended as the Linux distribution.





Visual Studio Code

  • Install VSCode from here.




Go

  1. Install Go from here or if you are using Homebrew, run brew install go.

  2. Install the following Go extension in VSCode: Extensions This will install several tool integrations in VSCode and most importantly the Go LSP.





Git

  • Install Git from here or if you are using Homebrew, run brew install git.




WSL = Windows Subsystem for Linux
LSP = Language Server Protocol









Let's see if it works

Hello World in Go!

Don't worry about the code for now. You will get to understand it when we go through the fundamentals.

Create a new file called main.go:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hello, World!")
}


Run:

go run main.go


You should see something that is not an error >D