purego

A library for calling C functions from Go without Cgo.

Motivation

The Ebitengine game engine was ported to use only Go on Windows. This enabled cross-compiling to Windows from any other operating system simply by setting GOOS=windows. The purego project was born to bring that same vision to the other platforms supported by Ebitengine.

Benefits

• Simple Cross-Compilation: No C means you can build for other platforms easily without a C compiler.
• Faster Compilation: Efficiently cache your entirely Go builds.
• Smaller Binaries: Using Cgo generates a C wrapper function for each C function called. Purego doesn't!
• Dynamic Linking: Load symbols at runtime and use it as a plugin system.
• Foreign Function Interface: Call into other languages that are compiled into shared objects.

Example

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"runtime"

	"github.com/ebitengine/purego"
)

func getSystemLibrary() string {
	switch runtime.GOOS {
	case "darwin":
		return "/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib"
	case "linux":
		return "libc.so.6"
	default:
		panic(fmt.Errorf("GOOS=%s is not supported", runtime.GOOS))
	}
}

func main() {
	libc, err := purego.Dlopen(getSystemLibrary(), purego.RTLD_NOW|purego.RTLD_GLOBAL)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	var puts func(string)
	purego.RegisterLibFunc(&puts, libc, "puts")
	puts("Calling C from Go without Cgo!")
}

Then to run: CGO_ENABLED=0 go run main.go

External Code

Purego uses code that originates from the Go runtime. These files are under the BSD-3 License that can be found in the Go Source. This is a list of the copied files:

• zcallback_darwin_*.s from package runtime
• internal/abi/abi_*.h from package runtime/cgo
• internal/fakecgo/asm_GOARCH.s from package runtime/cgo
• internal/fakecgo/callbacks.go from package runtime/cgo
• internal/fakecgo/go_GOOS_GOARCH.go from package runtime/cgo
• internal/fakecgo/iscgo.go from package runtime/cgo
• internal/fakecgo/setenv.go from package runtime/cgo