If you've got to this chapter with the intention of using the Walk framework and therefore distribute only to the Windows operating system, you can skip this preparation step as you don't need any additional compilation tools. All of the other toolkits that we have explored in this book require CGo for some functionality. The C compiler to enable CGo should already be set up for the platform you are developing on, but there is additional work needed to enable cross-compilation to other platforms. If you have a separate operating system installation for the development of each of your target platforms, then you can skip this step.

For this section, we assume development on a preferred operating system, and therefore the need to cross-compile for additional target platforms. Doing this will require installing a GCC compatible compiler for each target platform (for example, a Linux-based developer may need to install compilers for Windows and macOS).