purego

Have you tried purego? You can just embed the C library into the binary of the Go app call it directly in Go. Most of the time I have found calling C from Go faster or on par with calling C from Python. https://github.com/ebitengine/purego

If you want to avoid Cgo, you can use https://github.com/ebitengine/purego or Goffi to call the native functions. It's a bit cursed, but works.

There are undoubtedly still some optimizations lying around, but the biggest source of Go's FFI overhead is goroutines. There's only two "easy" solutions I can see: switch to N:N threading model or make the C code goroutine-aware. The former would speed up C calls at the expense of slowing down lots of ordinary Go code. Personally, I can still see some scenarios where that's beneficial, but it's pretty niche. The latter would greatly complicate the use of cgo, and defeat one of its core purposes, namely having access to large hard-to-translate C codebases without requiring extensive modifications of them. A lot of people compare Go's FFI overhead to that of other natively compiled languages, like Zig or Rust, or to managed runtime languages like Java (JVM) or C# (.NET), but those alternatives don't use green threads (the general concept b

That is a nice approach. I'll have to give that a try with rclone. I tried lots of things in the past but not using Alpine which is a great idea Another alternative is https://github.com/ebitengine/purego You can use this to dynamic load shared objects / DLLs so in the OP example they could disable systemd support if the systemd shared object did not load. This technique is used in the cgofuse library ( https://github.com/winfsp/cgofuse ) rclone uses which means rclone can run even if you don't have libfuse/winfsp installed. However the rclone mount subcommand won't work. The purego lib generalizes this idea. I haven't got round to trying this yet but it looks very promising.

Cgo is terrible, but if you just want some simple C calls from a library, you can use https://github.com/ebitengine/purego to generate the bindings. It is a bit cursed, but works pretty well. I'm using it in my hardware-backed KMIP server to interface with PKCS11.

That's good to know. I'm not making use of this assumption, but the purego package (came from ebitengine) does. It looks like they're aware of HostLayout [1] but I'm not sure how many other people have gotten the memo (HostLayout didn't exist before Go 1.23). [1]: https://github.com/ebitengine/purego/issues/259

Thank you author for your kind words about my Go SQLite driver. That said, purego solves a build infrastructure issue, not a perfomance issue. You're still using the same underlying mechanisms to call into C, and the same performance is expected. I'm not the one saying this, read the authors: https://github.com/ebitengine/purego/issues/202 wazero uses a different mechanism, the one used to call Go assembly, but adds its own overhead (trampolines, adapting calling conventions, and the inherent Wasm sandbox overhead, e.g. the guest can't read the host's memory, there's bounds checks, etc). Also “Cgo is fast” and “Cgo is slow” is not the correct framing; rather it depends, for various reasons: - Cgo is a moving target (it mostly improves with time, but can regress) - it's different to just call C from Go, or then callback Go from C - there's

It’s using purego: https://github.com/ebitengine/purego And linking against libtcl and libtk.

https://ebitengine.org/en/documents/install.html For anything other than windows: > Installing a C compiler > A C compiler is required as Ebitengine uses not only Go but also C. I mean, even on platforms without cgo, it's it working magically? No; it's using https://github.com/ebitengine/purego, which is: > A library for calling C functions from Go without Cgo. Like... I mean.... okaaaay, it's not cgo, but it's basically cgo? ...but it's not cgo so you can say 'no cgo' on your banner page? If you're calling c functions, it's not pure go. If calls some C library, and it doesn't work on any other platform, its like 'pure go, single platform'. hmm. Seems kind of like... this is maybe not the right hammer for gamedev; or, perhaps, maybe not quite mature yet... Certainly for someone in the 'solo dev pick your tools carefully' team, like the OP

The dynamic linking story in Go is complicated at best, particularly if you shun cgo, because you commonly need to cgo into ld.so to use dynamic linking. But there's this if you wanna try: https://github.com/ebitengine/purego

Also interesting project to point out since we discuss DNS and LDAP, nsswitch here: A library for calling C functions from Go without Cgo. https://github.com/ebitengine/purego https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34763681

In the malware reverse engineering scene, there are a lot of forks of the upstream "debug" go library, because it allows loading, parsing, compiling and executing libraries from disk (rather than in-kernel or in-userspace) because it is independent of dlopen. And there's also "purego" as an implementation that directly generates shellcode. Maybe those will help you, too? I am just mentioning these because for my use cases those approaches worked perfectly, CGO free. [1] https://github.com/Binject/debug [2] https://github.com/ebitengine/purego

I thought I had a piece of dust on my screen, but as I scrolled the dust scrolled: what do these 0xB7 characters do in the identifiers? Are they just "name mangling" to keep them from being exported or something? https://github.com/ebitengine/purego/blob/v0.2.0-alpha/sys_d... I noticed another 0xB7 character in a comment, and sure enough it seems to be part of the identifiers: https://github.com/ebitengine/purego/search?q=runtime%C2%B7c...