I am following Jack Mott's Games With Go series as a reference, which teaches programming in Go through small game-related projects.

• Simple, readable, performant code.
• Compiles to native executables. Simplifies sharing games, and doesn't rely on just-in-time compilation.
• Garbage collection is very low latency, compared to Java or C# which focus on throughput.
• First-class support for concurrency, memory allocation, and unit testing.

What things you need to install the software and how to install them.

• Install Go and Visual Studio Code.
• Install the Go extension in VSCode. It will generate everything you need.

This guide is based on https://github.com/veandco/go-sdl2.

1. Install GCC for Windows Binding SDL2 in Go requires Windows to compile C code. https://mingw-w64.org/doku.php/download/mingw-builds

• Version: latest
• Architecture: x86_64
• Threads: win32
• Exception: seh
• Build revision: latest

2. Download SDL2 development library (MinGW 32/64-bit). https://www.libsdl.org/download-2.0.php

3. Drag the contents of SDL2-2.0.8\x86_64-w64-mingw32 into C:\Program Files\mingw-w64\mingw64\x86_64-w64-mingw32

4. Set Environment variables Add these as new lines to the System Path variable:

• For SDL2: C:\Program Files\mingw-w64\x86_64-8.1.0-win32-seh-rt_v6-rev0\mingw64\x86_64-w64-mingw32\bin
• For GCC: C:\Program Files\mingw-w64\x86_64-8.1.0-win32-seh-rt_v6-rev0\mingw64\bin

5. Download SDL2_ttf and SDL2_mixer development libraries (MINGW 32/64-bit).

• https://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_ttf/
• https://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_mixer/
• Copy the contents of bin, include/SDL2 and lib into their respective folders at C:\Program Files\mingw-w64\x86_64-8.1.0-win32-seh-rt_v6-rev0\mingw64\x86_64-w64-mingw32

6. Get SDL2 bindings for Go

• $ go get -v github.com/veandco/go-sdl2/{sdl,mix,ttf}

If while installing SDL2 you encounter exit code 3221225781, simply restart your computer.