On 'go install' for plugins

[Jeffery Carr]

For those of us that think go plugins are the most important piece of technology to come out since the sandwich toaster, being unable to 'go install' a plugin is a problem one wants to solve.

Armed only with ignorance, I attacked this problem head on. Plunging directly into src/cmd/go/internal/load/pkg.go, I tried to do things like hard code cfg.BuildBuildmode to something to identify later. Easy first success!

+       if p.ImportPath == "go.wit.com/toolkits/gocui" {
+               buildmode = "plugin"
+               cfg.BuildBuildmode = "plugin"
+               cfg.BuildO = "/tmp/go/lib/blah2.so"
+       }

The cloak of deception cast, I attacked onwards into "cmd/go/internal/work". Here the onslaught of references to "main" increased its counterattack. It became evident that in the cases of '"main"', some seemed to be involved with 'package main' and others in detecting "function main()". There, after many battles in init.go gc.go build.go exec.go, etc, wounded and heavily damaged, it was time to retreat.

Let's trick it from the beginning? What is this, some sort of preprocessor cmd/go/internal/cfg/cfg.go or cmd/go/internal/load/pkg.go. Let's just deceive things at this point. Except it seems, one can only use the words in an abridged dictionary down there. Alas, this attack was declared dead at 2:25am. This is expected when going into conflict armed only with ignorance.

Silliness aside, the idea of:

Changing:

    package main

To:

    package plugin

seems ideal. Another option could be things like adding:

//go:plugin

Is there some plan being developed for this?

In the meantime, I worked around this by modifying a tool I've been using 'go-clone' to install plugins by looking for a .plugin file in the repo. I'm hoping something better like 'package plugin' could be adopted!

Best wishes,

jcarr

go install go.wit.com/apps/go-clone@latest

go install go.wit.com/apps/go-mod-clean@latest

go-clone --recursive --install go.wit.com/apps/helloworld

go-clone --recursive --install go.wit.com/toolkits/gocui

go-clone --recursive --install go.wit.com/toolkits/andlabs # uses gtk, works on linux, maybe macos too?

NOTES:

   * this works on debian sid

   * I still mainly work in ~/go/src because I can't get go.work files to work so although this should work with go.work files, it seems to fail sometimes with weird errors. Maybe someone will be able to explain to me what I'm doing wrong someday.

   * helloworld doesn't work on the macos yet, but works fine in linux. I think it's an AMD64 vs ARM64 issue.