You'll implement all the labs in Go. The Go web site contains lots of tutorial information. You should use Go 1.22 or any later version. You can check your Go version by running go version.
We recommend that you work on the labs on your own machine, so you can use the tools, text editors, etc. that you are already familiar with. Many editors have plug-ins for Go, e.g. the Go extension for VS Code. Some commercial IDEs like GoLand have free educational licenses. We are happy to provide support over Piazza and in office hours to help you set up Go. The labs probably won't work on Athena.
You can use Homebrew to install Go. After installing Homebrew, run brew install go.
Depending on your Linux distribution, you might be able to get an up-to-date version of Go from the package repository, e.g. by running apt install golang. Otherwise, you can manually install a binary from Go's website. First, make sure that you're running a 64-bit kernel (uname -a should mention "x86_64 GNU/Linux"), and then run:
$ wget -qO- https://go.dev/dl/go1.23.5.linux-amd64.tar.gz | sudo tar xz -C /usr/localYou'll need to make sure /usr/local/go/bin is on your PATH. You can do this by adding export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin to your shell's init file ( commonly this is one of .bashrc, .bash_profile or .zshrc)
The labs are believed to work under Microsoft's WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux, version 2).
To use WSL 2, first make sure you have the Windows Subsystem for Linux installed. Then add Ubuntu 24.04 from the Microsoft Store. Afterwards you should be able to launch Ubuntu Linux. Then you can follow the directions for Linux (above).
Make sure that you are running version 2 of WSL.
WSL 1 does not work with the labs.
To check,
run wsl -l -v in a Windows terminal to confirm that WSL
2 and the correct Ubuntu version are installed.