Triggering go:generate via go build/install?

[David Vennik]

One of the big advantages of many other build systems and for which reason many Go projects use Makefiles is that running generators is not automated.

As I see it, the only thing required to make it automatic is annotation to make note of the sources that generators build off and trigger rerunning it before the execution of the compilation.

All that would require is some way to tag files such that if the files hashes change the generator should be rerun. I probably am not listing all the ways that this could be done automatically. I mean, go:generate lines always include filesystem references, either folders or specific files, these could be automatically checksummed in go.sum to determine when to automatically run them.

As I see it, this lack of automatic code generation and the poor performance of the Go FFI, Cgo, are the two biggest factors that lead to projects drifting away from Go once someone decides to start putting foreign code into the mix that they want binary coupling. I think that a standardised run control system for child processes so foreign language binaries can interface with minimal work would also go some way to fix this problem since it isolates the runtimes completely, and in many cases only introduces a small latency cost.

[Volker Dobler]

Executing code during build is a 100% no-go from a security perspective.

Especially arbitrary 3rd party code.

So let me rephrase it:

> One of the big advantages of Go's build systems is that running

> generators is **not** automated.

V

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Mon, Aug 8, 2022 at 4:51 AM Volker Dobler <dr.volke...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Executing code during build is a 100% no-go from a security perspective.
> Especially arbitrary 3rd party code.
>
> So let me rephrase it:
>
> > One of the big advantages of Go's build systems is that running
> > generators is **not** automated.

Yes.

However, we could perhaps consider a way for "go build" to check
whether generated files are out of date and tell the user to run "go
generate".

Ian

> On Monday, 8 August 2022 at 12:34:43 UTC+2 stalke...@protonmail.ch wrote:
>>
>> One of the big advantages of many other build systems and for which reason many Go projects use Makefiles is that running generators is not automated.
>>
>> As I see it, the only thing required to make it automatic is annotation to make note of the sources that generators build off and trigger rerunning it before the execution of the compilation.
>>
>> All that would require is some way to tag files such that if the files hashes change the generator should be rerun. I probably am not listing all the ways that this could be done automatically. I mean, go:generate lines always include filesystem references, either folders or specific files, these could be automatically checksummed in go.sum to determine when to automatically run them.
>>
>> As I see it, this lack of automatic code generation and the poor performance of the Go FFI, Cgo, are the two biggest factors that lead to projects drifting away from Go once someone decides to start putting foreign code into the mix that they want binary coupling. I think that a standardised run control system for child processes so foreign language binaries can interface with minimal work would also go some way to fix this problem since it isolates the runtimes completely, and in many cases only introduces a small latency cost.
>

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