I was curious how defer is implemented. `defer` in Go is famously function-scoped, not lexically-scoped. This means that the number of actively-deferred statements is unbounded, which implies heap allocation.
The answer is that Solod breaks with Go semantics here: it just makes defer block-scoped (and unavailable in for/if blocks, which I don't quite get).
What's the point if it's incompatible? The README suggests using go's testing toolchain and type checker, but that's unreliable if the compiled code has different behavior than the tested code. That's like testing and typechecking your code in a C++ compiler but then for production you run it through a C compiler.
Would have been a lot more useful if it tried to match the Go behavior and threw a compiler error if it couldn't, e.g. when you defer in a loop.
Is this just for people who prefer Go syntax over C syntax?
I don't work regularly on it but I have a proof of concept go to c++ compiler that try to get the exact same behaviour : https://github.com/Rokhan/gocpp
At the moment, it sort of work for simple one-file project with no dependencies if you don't mind there is no garbage collector. (it try to compile recursively library imports but linking logic is not implemented)
As long as you exclude defers in a loop, this can be done statically: count the maximum number of defers in a function, and add an array of that size + counter at the function entrance. That would make it a strict subset.
I don't really "get" the sweet-spot being targeted here. You don't get channels, goroutines, or gc, so aside from syntax and spatial memory safety you're not really inheriting much from Go. There is also no pathway to integrate with existing Go libraries.
Spatial memory safety is nice but it's the temporal safety that worries me most, in nontrivial C codebases.
Go is my most productive language, but it is the worst for some of the usecases I want to use it for due to goroutines and GC pauses and things like that.
I learned C and programming when I was a middle school math nerd and so my understanding of functions was colored by the algebraic definition of a single value function. This led to me writing my code in a more functional paradigm than an object oriented paradigm. I struggled to learn Java. I struggled in programming class when we made the switch from VB6 to vb.net because I didn’t really understand object oriented programming.
I find go’s procedural nature to be the best language for my understanding of programming with functions. The way the object oriented code is possible, but not required allows me to build types and objects that I can compose and use as I understand them, not the way that object oriented, inheritance, and polymorphism requires me to subclass.
I recently have had the idea for a project and I found the perfect ECS library that would allow me to compose my entities and components the way I do in Go, but it does not interface cleanly with Cgo either in runtime overhead or development overhead.
The official bindings for it are rust, c, c#, zig, lua, and clojure.
This would allow me to use it by writing Go code that calls it natively like C.
I’m not concerned about not getting to use Go libraries. I believe in Roll Your Own and always had to roll my own when I was learning C. Go’s stdlib is tight and lends itself to RYO really well.
The claim that no goroutines makes this pointless isn't quite right. Migrated 50 services off Docker Compose using Nomad and half of them had zero concurrency needs. A safe Go-syntax C target is actually useful for that layer.
As a Go developer I would use this unless...I would have to build the std libraries myself. Now I also wonder how this compares with tinyGo. Why would you pick one over the other...
I'm reminded of the tools in programs like Ghidra or IDA which can take assembly code and convert it into a C-like language. If you could create one of those tools that also takes in the source file so that it names things somewhat reasonably, could you create an anything to C translator? As long as the original file compiles to assembly, that is
I once used Ghidra to decompile a hand-written ARM assembly floating point library and compile the result to a different architecture, and it was significantly faster than GCC’s built in methods…
But in general this kind of thing is very unreliable for any non-trivial code without a lot of manual work, so a better approach could be to compile to WebAssembly which can be translated into C
It may be easier if you also have the original source file (I've not don't much decompilation myself, only seen other people doing it), as more of a custom solution rather than using an existing system
That is an interesting project, which i have been following for a while. Unfortunately, progress has slowed a lot recently. I hope development picks up…and that the author chooses a different name for the language.
> So supports structs, methods, interfaces, slices, multiple returns, and defer.
> To keep things simple, there are no channels, goroutines, closures, or generics.
Sure, slices and multiple return values are nice, but it's not what makes Go good. When people think about Go they usually think about channels and goroutines. YMMV
While I do kind of get what the appeal and target audience is supposed to be, I absolutely don't get why you'd choose a subset and still have it behave differently than the Go counterpart. For me that destroys the whole purpose of the project.
Biggest reason is usually the toolchain. Debuggers, sanitizers, profilers all just work when your target is C. Go through LLVM and you get similar optimization but now you own the backend. With C, gcc and clang handle that part.
Translating code to C usually results in some nearly unreadable code. I submit the C++ to C translator, cfront, as evidence. I've looked into using C as a target backend now and then, but always "noped" out of it.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover, however, that C code can be readily translated to D.
I don’t think that’s a valid comparison. It compares two entirely different cases.
In general, if the guts of Foo are similar to those of Bar, translating Foo to Bar is fairly easy.
If Foo has additional guts, as in the C++-to-ℂ translator, translating those parts can lead to hard to read code.
In the C-to-D translator case, it’s not Foo that has additional guts, though, but Bar.
Then, a reasonable 1:1 transaction is easy. Doing it in idiomatic style can still be hard, though. For example D has garbage collection, classes and inheritance. I doubt the readily translation of C to D will replace C equivalents (e.g. a garbage collector written in C that’s part of the code) by those where possible.
It's true that D has many features that are not part of C, and a translator from C to D will not recognize constructions in C meant to exhibit inheritance. It's also true that a C to D translator will not be able to translate metaprogramming done with the C preprocessor.
It is a valid comparison, though, as there is no point to designing a language that has a 1:1 mapping to/from C.
The answer is that Solod breaks with Go semantics here: it just makes defer block-scoped (and unavailable in for/if blocks, which I don't quite get).
https://github.com/solod-dev/solod/blob/main/doc/spec.md#def...
Would have been a lot more useful if it tried to match the Go behavior and threw a compiler error if it couldn't, e.g. when you defer in a loop.
Is this just for people who prefer Go syntax over C syntax?
At the moment, it sort of work for simple one-file project with no dependencies if you don't mind there is no garbage collector. (it try to compile recursively library imports but linking logic is not implemented)
In C you can allocate dynamically on the stack using alloca or a VLA.
Spatial memory safety is nice but it's the temporal safety that worries me most, in nontrivial C codebases.
Go is my most productive language, but it is the worst for some of the usecases I want to use it for due to goroutines and GC pauses and things like that.
I learned C and programming when I was a middle school math nerd and so my understanding of functions was colored by the algebraic definition of a single value function. This led to me writing my code in a more functional paradigm than an object oriented paradigm. I struggled to learn Java. I struggled in programming class when we made the switch from VB6 to vb.net because I didn’t really understand object oriented programming.
I find go’s procedural nature to be the best language for my understanding of programming with functions. The way the object oriented code is possible, but not required allows me to build types and objects that I can compose and use as I understand them, not the way that object oriented, inheritance, and polymorphism requires me to subclass.
I recently have had the idea for a project and I found the perfect ECS library that would allow me to compose my entities and components the way I do in Go, but it does not interface cleanly with Cgo either in runtime overhead or development overhead.
The official bindings for it are rust, c, c#, zig, lua, and clojure.
This would allow me to use it by writing Go code that calls it natively like C.
I’m not concerned about not getting to use Go libraries. I believe in Roll Your Own and always had to roll my own when I was learning C. Go’s stdlib is tight and lends itself to RYO really well.
SWIG[0] is a viable option for incorporating C code as well.
0 - https://swig.org/Doc4.4/Go.html#Go
what's the benefit? for loops?
I wonder if it could be integrated with https://github.com/tidwall/neco, which has Go-like coroutines, channels, and synchronization methods.
It’s a mix of go and rust syntax that translates to C
But in general this kind of thing is very unreliable for any non-trivial code without a lot of manual work, so a better approach could be to compile to WebAssembly which can be translated into C
[1]: https://codapi.org/
Sure when I started Go there were Go routines plastered everywhere. And now I think harder: “do I really need a go routine here?”
> To keep things simple, there are no channels, goroutines, closures, or generics.
Sure, slices and multiple return values are nice, but it's not what makes Go good. When people think about Go they usually think about channels and goroutines. YMMV
While I do kind of get what the appeal and target audience is supposed to be, I absolutely don't get why you'd choose a subset and still have it behave differently than the Go counterpart. For me that destroys the whole purpose of the project.
So no go error handling?
Not a choice I would have made.I was pleasantly surprised to discover, however, that C code can be readily translated to D.
In general, if the guts of Foo are similar to those of Bar, translating Foo to Bar is fairly easy.
If Foo has additional guts, as in the C++-to-ℂ translator, translating those parts can lead to hard to read code.
In the C-to-D translator case, it’s not Foo that has additional guts, though, but Bar.
Then, a reasonable 1:1 transaction is easy. Doing it in idiomatic style can still be hard, though. For example D has garbage collection, classes and inheritance. I doubt the readily translation of C to D will replace C equivalents (e.g. a garbage collector written in C that’s part of the code) by those where possible.
It is a valid comparison, though, as there is no point to designing a language that has a 1:1 mapping to/from C.