Here are 10 Go language interview questions to strengthen your preparation.
Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. The concurrency mechanism in Go makes it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code while retaining the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It is a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.
Source: Go Official Website.
1. What is Go and what are its benefits?
Go is considered as a general-purpose language designed mainly for servers. It is a strongly statically typed language. Go provides in-built support for garbage collection. It also supports concurrent programming. Programs are constructed using “packages”.
The management of dependencies is a great feature of Golang. Go uses a traditional compile-and-link model. This compile-and-link model is used to generate executable binaries.
The prominent benefits of the Go language are:
- It supports the “environment adopting patterns”.
- Go is fast in its compilation time.
- It has in-built concurrency support and allows the creation of light-weight processes via goroutines, channels, and select statements.
- Go supports interfaces and type embedding.
2. What do you mean by static type variable declaration in the Go language?
Static type variable declaration provides confidence to the compiler that at least one variable exists with the given name and declared type. This helps the compiler proceed for further compilation without requiring a variable’s complete detail. The interpretation of a variable in Go is done at the time of compilation. At the time of linking of the program, the Go compiler needs a formal variable declaration.
3. What is a method in Go?
Go language supports special types of functions. These are called methods. In a method’s declaration syntax, a “receiver” is used to represent the function container. The receiver can be used to call a function using the dot (“.”) operator.
4. What is a string literal?
Go interview questions are incomplete with a string literal. A string literal is obtained when a sequence of characters are concatenated. It denotes a string constant. There are two forms of string literals in the Go language:
- Raw string literals: In this case, the value is a character sequence enclosed in backquotes i.e., ‘ ‘. The value of a string literal is a string consisting of uninterrupted characters in between the backquotes.
- Interpreted string literals: They are enclosed in double-quotes i.e., ” “. The content in between the double quotes (newline and unescaped double quotes) forms the value of the literal in this case.
5. What is a package in Go?
All Go programs are made up of packages. A package is a directory inside your Go workspace that contains one or more Go source files, or other Go packages. The “main” package is from where your Go program starts executing. It shows that the program is executable.
6. What is a workspace in Go?
A workspace is what keeps all of the Go source code. A workspace is a directory in your system hierarchy that contains three additional directories at the root position:
- src: It contains GO source files organized into packages.
- pkg: It contains package objects.
- bin: It contains executable commands.
src, pkg, and bin are used for organizing the source code.
Read Also: 10 Effective Groovy Interview Questions
7. What are the advantages of Go?
- Go compiles quickly.
- Go has concurrency support.
- Functions are Go’s first-class objects.
- Go supports garbage collection.
- Strings and maps are in-built.
8. What is a routine in Go? Which method is used to stop goroutine?
A goroutine is a function that runs with other functions in concurrent mode. To stop goroutine, pass the goroutine as a signal channel; the signal channel can be used to push a new value into the program when you want the goroutine to stop.
9. Explain the ‘For’ loop syntax in Go.
The for loop syntax in Go language is:
for loop [condition |( initial; increment; condition) | Range] {
Define statements;
}
The control flow in a for loop is as follows:
- If a condition is available, then for loop executes until the condition is true; this step is the same as any other language.
- When (initial; increment; conditions) is available, then the unit step above is executed first. This step allows the declaration and initialization of any loop control variables. A statement is not needed here if a semicolon appears. After this, the condition is evaluated. If the condition is true, the main body of the loop is executed.
After the main statement of the for loop executes correctly, the program’s flow of control jumps goes back to the next line which is an increment statement. This statement does nothing, but it updates the loop control variable. This statement may be left blank if a semicolon comes after the condition. The next condition is now checked again and then evaluated. If the condition is true, the loop runs once more, and the process repeats itself. The general approach, therefore, is to first run the body of a loop, perform the increment step, and execute the condition again. This continues until the condition becomes false upon which the loop terminates. - If a range is also given, then the for loop runs for each value in the range. An interview on the Go language is incomplete without being quizzed on for loop.
10. How many ways are there to pass a parameter to a defined method in Go?
When calling a function in Go, there are two ways to pass an argument to a function:
- Call by value: This approach works by copying the actual value of an argument into the function’s formal parameter. Changes made to the function’s formal parameter do not affect the argument.
- Call by reference: This approach works by copying the argument address into the formal parameter. The address is used inside the function for accessing the actual argument. It means that parameter changes affect the actual argument.
If you know about any other concept or logic in Golang that is necessary while preparing for interviews, do comment below.
