# Operators in Go

> An overview of operators in Go, from assignment and comparison to arithmetic, increment and decrement, and the boolean &&, || and ! operators.

Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2022-09-17 | Topics: [Go](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/go/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/golang-operators/

We used some operators so far in our code examples, like `=`, `:=` and `<`. 

Let’s talk a bit more about them.

We have assignment operators `=` and `:=` we use to declare and initialize variables:

```go
var a = 1

b := 1
```

We have comparison operators `==` and `!=` that take 2 arguments and return a boolean

```go
var num = 1
num == 1 //true
num != 1 //false
```

and `<`, `<=`, `>`, `>=`:

```go
var num = 1
num > 1 //false
num >= 1 //true
num < 1 //false
num <= 1 //true
```

We have binary (require two arguments) arithmetic operators, like `+`, `-`, `*`, `/`, `%`.

```go
1 + 1 //2
1 - 1 //0
1 * 2 //2
2 / 2 //1
2 % 2 //0
```

`+` can also join strings:

```go
"a" + "b" //"ab"
```

We have unary operators `++` and `--` to increment or decrement a number:

```go
var num = 1
num++ // num == 2
num-- // num == 1
```

> Note that unlike C or [JavaScript](https://flaviocopes.com/javascript/) we can’t prepend them to a number like `++num`. Also, the operation does not return any value.
> 

We have boolean operators that help us with making decisions based on `true` and `false` values: `&&`, `||` and `!`

```go
true && true  //true
true && false //false
true || false //true
false || false //false
!true  //false
!false //true
```

Those are the main ones.