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I am beginner in go and facing difficulty in understanding go/pkg folder.As suggested by documentation it contains pkg/mod and pkg/windowsamd_64. pkg/windowsamd_64 for storing compiled files. What happens if I have a file importing some external github modules and do go build on that.

  • Will it go first to pkg/mod (but modules are compiled in pkg/windowsamd_64) to search for external modules
  • Will it go first to pkg/windowsamd_64 (then what will be use of pkg/mod) to search for modules
  • Will it go to {gopath}/src and do something from there
  • pkg/mod is just a folder ,why do we call it cache as it will keep on filling or better when does it populate?
Divanshu Aggarwal
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1 Answers1

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The go command has two different modes of locating packages: module mode (introduced in Go 1.11) and GOPATH mode (much older). Module mode is the default as of Go 1.16, and if you are new to Go you will probably want to work exclusively in that mode. (There isn't much point to working in GOPATH mode unless you have a large legacy codebase that requires it.)

pkg/mod stores cached source code for use in module mode. The source code for a given version of a module is downloaded automatically when you build a package from that module (for example, as a dependency of some other package).

GOPATH/src stores source code for use in GOPATH mode. You can also choose to work in that directory in module mode, but that's a completely optional/aesthetic choice and shouldn't change the behavior of anything in module mode.

pkg/windows_amd64 stores installed packages in GOPATH mode. However, installed packages aren't very useful anyway because Go has a separate build cache (even in GOPATH mode). So you can mostly ignore pkg/windows_amd64 completely.

bcmills
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