Golang in sixty seconds — variables

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To create a new variable in Go we use thevar keyword, followed by the variable name (x) and type (string) and then assign it a value (“Hello”).

var x string = “Hello”

Assigning value is optional, so we could also write it

var x string
x = “Hello”

Variables are mutable. This means they can be changed. So we can change x from“Hello” to something else:

x = "Hi"

When creating a new variable with a starting value, Go can infer the type, so we can do this:

var age = 5

Generally you should use the shorter syntax for this whenever possible:

age := 5

Constants are a special type of variable that are immutable. This means it cannot be reassigned. They are created the same way as variables except you use theconst keyword instead of var . Again, Go can infer the type from the assigned value.

const x = “Hello”
// The following line would create an error
x = "Hi" 

You can also assign multiple variables or constants (using const instead of var) at once:

var(
  a = 5
  b = 10
  c = 15
)

Richard Bell

Self taught software developer with 11 years experience excelling at JavaScript/Typescript, React, Node and AWS.

I love learning and teaching and have mentored several junior developers over my career. I find teaching is one of the best ways to solidify your own learning, so in the past few years I've been maintaining a technical blog where I write about some things that I've been learning.

I'm passionate about building a teams culture and processes to make it efficient and satisfying to work in. In many roles I have improved the quality and reliability of the code base by introducing or improving the continuous integration pipeline to include quality gates.