Binaries vs. Libraries in Go

In Go, there are two types of compilation you can do: compilation as a library or as an executable (or binary). I discovered this by writing the following Go code:

package hello

import (
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    fmt.Println("hello world!")
}

Once I started compiling the code using go build hello.go, it won't create a new file that I can run. I found out that the reason why it won't output anything was I wasn't referring to the package as package main.

TIL that Go requires a main package to produce a binary i.e. a program that can be run.

Corrected code for compilation as a binary:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    fmt.Println("hello world!")
}