Go Compiling

While Go is a nice language to use, there is a bit of ceremony to setting things up and compiling.
This guide assumes that you have successfully installed Go. It can be downloaded from go.dev

Create Project Folder

This is where your source code will live. For this example make a folder called 'Hello World'.

Initialise The Folder

Open a command prompt inside the folder you have just created and type 'go mod init hello'. This creates an init file which is used to set your program's Go version and any dependencies. In this case it means our exe output file will be called 'hello'.

C:\Hello World>go mod init hello
go: creating new go.mod: module hello

Create Our Program

A nice simple 'Hello World' program. Save this as hello.go into the folder created above.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
)

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

Compiling

To compile the program, use a command prompt inside the Hello World folder and type go build

C:\Hello World>go build

C:\Hello World>

If everything was successful, there are no messages. If you have any errors, go correct them and try again!

Running The Program

The program compiled to hello.exe so we can run it as follows:

C:\Hello World>hello
Hello World!

You should have now made and run your first Go program!

Updated (06/08/2026)