CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cgo
ddibiase
ddibiase

Reputation: 1502

Using Go in C limitations

Recently stumbled on this article about leveraging Go's shared library compiler in C and other languages: https://medium.com/learning-the-go-programming-language/calling-go-functions-from-other-languages-4c7d8bcc69bf

I'm wondering what the limitations of the compiler use is? For example once compiled will Go's net and socket libraries all work as they would as a standalone Go application?

ie. could I theoretically have a Go application as the communication layer (lets say HTTP) and a C application performing some lower level processing which is handed to Go for delivery?

Sorry for the awkward explanation of the use case, simply trying to understand how Go would react in a compiled environment in general. I know very little about shared libraries at this level, so just a curiosity.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 298

Answers (1)

Jacob Davis-Hansson
Jacob Davis-Hansson

Reputation: 2663

In theory, there are no limitations - conceptually the .so is just a bunch of machine code that happens to bundle a very smart memory manager, and expose an API that matches the shared library format.

There are, in practice, a minimal set of quirks. For instance, the program linking in the go .so can currently not call dlclose on it: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/11100

You may find the open list of issues mentioning c-shared to be helpful: https://github.com/golang/go/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue%20is%3Aopen%20c-shared

Upvotes: 1

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