This is a companion to http://golang.org/doc/install/source providing additional instructions for various operating systems.
On OS X, a C compiler is bundled in the command line tools for
Xcode,
and you don't need to install the whole Xcode to compile Go.
If you have already installed Xcode 4.3+, you can install command
line tools from the Components tab of the Downloads preferences panel.
In more recent versions of Xcode, you can use xcode-select --install
command to install the command line tools without opening Xcode.
To verify you have a working compiler, just invoke gcc
in a freshly created Terminal window, unless you see the
"gcc: command not found" error, you are ready to go.
On Ubuntu/Debian, use sudo apt-get install gcc libc6-dev.
If you want to build 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit system you'll also need the libc6-dev-i386 package.
On RedHat/Centos 6, use sudo yum install gcc glibc-devel.
If you want to build 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit system you'll need both
glibc-devel.i386 and glibc-devel.x86_64 packages.
On Windows, install gcc with
TDM-GCC.
(Make sure you add its bin subdirectory to your PATH.) Go does not support the Cygwin toolchain.