Write Your First Go Program: A Step‑by‑Step Hello World Tutorial

First Go Program

This is the second tutorial in the Golang series; if you need an introduction to Go or installation instructions, refer to the previous article.

The best way to learn a programming language is by writing code, so let’s create the first Go program.

We recommend using Visual Studio Code with the Go extension (or GoLand) as the IDE, which provides autocomplete, code styling, and many other features.

package main

import "fmt"

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

Run Go Program

There are several ways to run the program:

Use go run helloworld.go at the command prompt; the console will display Hello World.

Use go install hello, then execute $GOPATH/bin/hello.

Use the Go Playground (online) to run the program quickly; a link to a pre‑created hello world example is provided.

Explain the Hello World Program

The following code is the program we just wrote:

package main //1
import "fmt" //2
func main() { //3
    fmt.Println("Hello World") //4
}

Explanation of each line:

package main – Every Go source file starts with a package declaration; main indicates an executable program.

import "fmt" – Imports the fmt package, which provides formatted I/O functions such as printing to standard output.

func main() – The entry point of the program; execution begins here.

fmt.Println("Hello World") – Calls Println from the fmt package to write the string Hello World to the console.

The source code can be downloaded from the linked GitHub repository.

Next, proceed to the third part of the Golang series to learn about variables.