Compiling Go Programs

• March 20 2024
• 4 min. read

In all previous Go-related posts, we've just run the code using Go's run command, like so:

go run main.go <parameters>

But there are times when we must compile the program either for internal use or to share with third parties.

This post will describe how to run programs without compiling them, how to compile programs in Go, how to give them a name, how to cross-compile to support multiple platforms, and how to run the resulting binaries.

Running the code #

To run the code execute the following command on the root directory of the project

go run main.go <target_directory> <source_directory or file>

Compiling the code #

To create a binary for the application run the following command.

go build

If you want to specify a name for the binary run this command instead.

go build -o <binary_name>

These commands will build main.go into the specified binary or main if there is no name specified.

Cross-Compilation #

The build commands we've used so far will generate binaries that will only run on the OS they were compiled on. If you compile this in macOS, the binary will not work on Windows or Linux systems.

You can create binaries that will run on other operating systems, this is called cross-compiling, but you have to be deliberate about it using a combination of the GOOS and GOARCH environmental variables.

For example, to use macOS to compile a Linux binary, run the following command:

env GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build -o <linux_binary_name>

You can also generate WASM binaries that will run on the browser:

env GOOS=js GOARCH=wasm go build -o <wasm_binary_name>

For more information on WASM and Go, see Revisiting Webassembly With Go.

To see all the OS/Architecture combinations available for cross-compilation run the following command.

go tool dist list

Scripting The Compilation Process #

We're running the compilation on an Intel macOS machine so running the build command on its own will generate a darwin/amd64 binary by default.

That means that we need to look at the following additional compilation targets, listed with GOOS and GOARCH values:

I created the following Bash script to automate all compilations for the project.

It first will compile the macOS versions of the program; one for Intel and one for ARM.

Then, for Linux and Windows, we run a for loop to compile binaries for all GOOS/GOARCH combinations.

#! /usr/bin/env bash

# Architectures we want to target
archs=(amd64 arm arm64)

echo "Starting Compilation"

echo "Compiling macOS binaries"
go build -o mdconverter_mac-amd64
echo "Compiled binary from mac/amd64"
env GOOS=darwin GOARCH=arm64 go build -o mdconverter_mac-arm64
echo "Compiled binary from mac/arm64"

echo "Compiling Linux binaries"
for arch in ${archs[@]}
do
	env GOOS=linux GOARCH=${arch} go build -o mdconverter_lin_${arch}
	echo "Compiled linux/${arch}"
done

echo "Compiling Windows binaries"
for arch in ${archs[@]}
do
	env GOOS=windows GOARCH=${arch} go build -o mdconverter_win_${arch}
	echo "Compiled windows/${arch}"
done

Running the program #

In Linux and macOS you need to make the binary executable by running this command:

chmod +x <binary_name>

You can then run the binary we just compiled run:

./<binary_name> <output_directory> <input_directory_or_file>

• Go

Edit on Github