Go 2, here we come

Re:Go 2, here we come by jniedrauer on Thursday November 29, 2018 @11:25PM (#18566657)

> Simple scripts, bash until they need their first 'if' or flag or loop, then Go too.

If you don't mind, can you give a little insight on what this looks like in practice? I'm not sure how to use a compiled language as a script. I've played with executing go as a script using a shebang hack, but I somehow don't think this is how others are doing it.

For reference, the shebang hack I was using looked like this:

    //usr/bin/env go run $0 $@; exit $?
    package main

    import "fmt"

    func main() {
        fmt.Println("i am a script")
    }

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Re:Go 2, here we come by EricBurnett on Friday November 30, 2018 @12:11AM (#18566875)

It looks more like Go code than a bash script - the tradeoff we settled on is that pretty much as soon as you need to add any sort of logic it's no longer really a simple "script" and you _know_ it's just going to grow into a monstrosity. Better to use a language with real functions, real error handling, that you can actually unit test, etc. In that sense, I guess you could say we write lots of little tools moreso than we write scripts.

For something of this form, if the standard library has the functionality, we us it - os.Mkdir() instead of `mkdir` and so on. But to simplify shelling out, we have a little library that includes the interface

  type Runner interface {
	Execute(dir, name string, args ...string) (*CmdOutput, error)
  }

so it's easy enough to call miscellaneous programs and get the exit code / stdout / stderr. It also supports printing and executing a command, etc.

Iteratively executing a program of this form looks like `go run whatever --flag=value`, though your shebang hack looks like it'd also do nicely.

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