godep

"cross platform compatible with no other dependencies". No, not at all. Not even close. Your go generate comment takes the form of //go:generate someCommand arg1 arg2 That's as far from cross-platform as possible. For example, their "yacc" example will not run on a platform without yacc. Any command you put there will have to be present on each platform and any command you put there is a dependency. Worse yet, it's a dependency that you can't explicitly declare and manage. You can't say "runtime dependencies: github.com/tools/godep, generate dependencies: yacc". This is a terrible mess if you want to write a cross-platform generator and it's an even bigger mess if your generator isn't something present on every platform already because otherwise generate will just fail with "command not found".

I keep meaning to spend some time playing with Go, but I haven't yet so I don't know how that feels. However, I wonder what it says that several dependency management tools have emerged for Go. https://github.com/mattn/gom https://github.com/nitrous-io/goop https://github.com/tools/godep

It is worth noting that godep recently added an import path rewrite option, which removes the need to manipulate your workspace's packages or even run the dependency tool in order to `go get` or build your code. https://github.com/tools/godep/commit/983ff9241cead0f7e6ad0a... Edit: Though, perhaps the final solution could be cleaner with a vendoring tool written from the ground up with the purpose of import path rewriting. From what I can tell, goop has the same GOPATH issues as godep, but godep allows you to address it in different ways. save/restore is one way, and there is also the proxy to the go tool `godep go` which looks to be the goop approach.

> [go get] Only works for source code packages, not > binary dependencies. There's no such thing as a binary dependency in the Go ecosystem. (At least, not without stretching some definitions.) It's one of Go's greatest strengths, actually. > There isn't a way to specific source code versions/tags > in a portable way. Well, the best practice is to vendor[0], and there are plenty of third-party tools like godep[1] that can manage it for you. ___ [0] http://peter.bourgon.org/go-in-production/#dependency-manage... [1] https://github.com/tools/godep

Ruby's dependency management (rubygems) also came from the community and is now part of the standard library. That seems like a good model to follow. Dependency management for Go is definitely on people's radar. https://github.com/tools/godep has been getting some traction.

How is this different from godep? https://github.com/tools/godep

What an interesting article, thanks for the writeup. Are you using Docker for containers? As a language neophyte I found this far more persuasive than arguments over emergent behaviour[1], because it talks about actual practice, as opposed to talking in abstractions (which rarely leads to fruitful discussion). The attraction of Go to me is in its commitment to simplicity, at the expense of some power or terseness it becomes easy to read, easy to extend, and hard to use to create monstrous complexity. It feels like an improved C rather than building on the traditions of C++ say. The package system, import system, composition and no inheritance, and extensive use of interfaces all encourage simplicity above all. Composition - it's harder to create huge taxonomies which all depend on a common root. Packaging - encourages very simple small co

Some of the pain points I've seen: * while "go get" is nice, it doesn't handle version pinning at all. So for a large team working on a go program, you need another solution. Luckily there are tools like godep[0] that will allow version pinning and putting it's source code into your projects root. * debuggers (gdb) are only partially supported. Most people don't have problems with this, but occasionally it's an issue. * Windows support is not as strong as Linux and OSX. But it still works surprisingly well. [0] https://github.com/tools/godep

or dependency management you can use external tools like godep[1]. [1] https://github.com/tools/godep

Have you looked at godep? I have been using it lately and it has been working pretty well. https://github.com/kr/godep

> I know this has been beaten to death You don't say. 1. http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2011/12/esmereldas-imagina... 2. https://github.com/kr/godep 3. http://golang.org/LICENSE