I’ve been wanting to learn (and do something) with the language Erlang for over two years now. But every time I fire up vim and start typing a get a this-is-not-Unix feeling (aka Java-sickness). The syntax is just not right for me.

But now Google, by the creators of Unix and C, give us Go! Which promises to give us Erlang functionality in a C-like language. Just what I wanted!

Basically just follow the steps on golang.org. In short it boils down to:

sudo apt-get install bison gcc libc6-dev ed
sudo apt-get install mercurial
hg clone -r release https://go.googlecode.com/hg/ ~/go

OK, now you have the source, set the Go variables to their correct values.

export GOROOT=~/go
export GOOS=linux
export GOARCH=386  # or amd64 for 64 bit

Now build and install it

cd ~/go/src
./all.bash

Typically to binaries are installed to ~/bin, so be sure that you have that directory in your path. The following is installed in my case:

% ls -l | grep 2009-11-12 | awk ' { print $8 } '
6cov
6nm
6prof
8a
8c
8g
8l
cgo
ebnflint
godefs
godoc
gofmt
gopack
gotest
goyacc
hgpatch
quietgcc

Now step two: learning and programming in the language itself…