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camdencheek | 2 years ago

Definitely possible! However, I prefer to avoid cgo wherever possible for more than just the overhead.

In my experience:

- It complicates builds by requiring a C toolchain

- It makes single, static binaries more difficult

- It makes portability more difficult (not that assembly is portable though)

- It causes difficult-to-debug issues (I recently ran into an issue where MacOS signing changed, causing all my cgo binaries to be killed on startup)

- Debuggers don't work across Cgo boundaries (they do with go ASM!)

I think Dave Cheney said it best: https://dave.cheney.net/2016/01/18/cgo-is-not-go

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pjmlp|2 years ago

The whole "cgo is not Go" bashing is a kind of joke, maybe if Go 2 ever comes to light, one of the first breaking changes should be to remove cgo.

There, beautiful Go code from that point onwards.

beautron|2 years ago

Dear Lord, no! I depend on cgo for my game!

What's more, I have no complaints about cgo. It hasn't been a performance problem at all (my game runs smoothly at 240hz). And the interface for binding to C is quite simple and nice to work with (I made my own bindings to SDL2, OpenGL, and Steamworks).

Cgo did make cross-compiling trickier to set up, but I managed to do it with a fair amount of elbow grease (Windows and MacOS builds on my Linux desktop).