LiteIDE a new IDE for Go programing language

Google created an open sourced programming language called GO which tries to combine the performance of a compiled language like C with a development speed of working in a language like Python.

In opinion it is also important to have a smart IDE which provides help with coding. One of the biggest helps I think is code completion.  If you are new to a programming language it helps you to understand quicker other libraries by suggesting function names and arguments.

Google provides Eclipse plugins for Android development ADT and for their web app programming language Dart.  To my surprise they do not provide any Eclipse plugin for GO. However, I found one Eclipse plugin called Goclipse but it looks to me that it may require more love, because the last release was in May 2011.

Recently, I found an IDE for GO called LiteIDE which is open source and cross-platform. It provides code completion for GO which works very nicely like the below picture shows. A full feature list of LiteIDE can be found here.

On my laptop I use Sabayon Linux which has a package for GO, however it is not the latest version of GO. Below are step-by-step instructions on how to install GO together with LiteIDE.

1. Step: Install GO

$ cd Downloads
$ wget -c http://go.googlecode.com/files/go1.1.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
$ tar xfvz go1.1.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
$ mkdir -p ~/apps/go_packages
$ mv go ~/apps

2. Step: Install LiteIDE

$ cd Downloads
$ git clone https://github.com/visualfc/liteide
$ cd liteide/build/
$ export QTDIR=/usr/lib/qt4
$ sh build_linux.sh
$ mv liteide/ $HOME/apps

3. Step: Set up environment variable in .bashrc

export $APPS=/home/uqmlore1/apps
export GOROOT=$APPS/go
export GOPATH=$APPS/go_packages
export GOOS=linux
export GOARCH=amd64
export LITEIDE=$APPS/liteide/bin/
export PATH=$GO/bin:$GOPATH/bin:$LITEIDE:$PATH

4. Test GO and LiteIDE

$ . ~/.bashrc
$ go version
go version go1.1.2 linux/amd64

$ liteide

Have fun!