Goscript

An alternative implementation of Golang specs, written in Rust for embedding or wrapping.

NOTE: https://volang.dev/ (repo) is the successor to this project. This project is no longer maintained.

Website

What

In other words, it's just another flavor of Go.
It's designed to work with other Rust code in the case where you want to offer the users of your library/app the ability to use a "simpler" language to call the native (Rust) code, like what Lua is for Redis/WoW, or Python for NumPy/Sublime Text.

Why

It's native to Rust, and your Rust project is looking for a scripting language.
Go is nice and easy and you are familiar with it.
To Rust programmers, it should be very well understood that compiler helps, as a strictly typed language, Goscript's type checker helps a lot compared to dynamically type languages, especially when your codebase gets larger.

How

Goscript Internals I: Overview

When

This readme update serves as an alpha release announcement.
Almost all the language features are implemented as per the specs(pre-1.18, i.e. excluding generics).
Part of the standard library is ported, which is not fully working.
There are still a lot of work to be done besides libraries, like API cleanup, Documentation, and a lot more test cases.
Overall it's considered buggy although it passes dozens of test cases.
A beta release is expected in about a year from now.

Who

email: pb01005051 at Gmail.
discord: join

FAQ

Is this a new language?

No, this is Go by definition. You can think of it as a hybrid of Go and Python, it takes the design of Go and implements it the way Python does. So, I think it's also fair to call it a scripting language.

Why not a new language?

It's much easier to implement a language than to design one, I don't think I'm able to design a language that people would invest their time to learn. Go may be not perfect as a scripting language, but to me it works Ok.

Why not just use Python/Lua (with Rust)?

People will/do, and Goscript can be a reasonable alternative, a strong type system can be a friend not enemy of your creativity.

Is Goscript fast/slow?

I'm afraid it may be slower than you think. It's a VM based implementation without JIT, so there is an upper bound. Also, there is a tradeoff between performance and project complexity, we don't want a embedding language to be too big. For now, you can only expect a performance comparable to Python, I'm not sure how far we'll go with optimization in the long term.

Does Goscript support multi-threading/parallelization?

No, that'd hurt single-thread performance and make things a lot harder to implement. I guess that's also why Python/Lua doesn't support parallelization. But it supports concurrency exceptionally well via goroutine :). It's also possible to introduce parallelization with libraries in the future.

When can we actually use Goscirpt?

As mentioned above, I hope we can get it production ready in a year. I started this project three years ago, and I'll do my best not to abandon it.

How can I help?

+ Report issues. + Send a PR if it's a minor fix. + If you plan to contribute complex changes, please contact me for a discussion first.

Just want to see if it does run Go code

Make sure your Rust installation is up to date.
Clone this repository.
Go to goscript/engine
Put whatever you want in temp.gos
Run cargo test temp -- --nocapture
Or it should be trivial to make an executable that runs Go code following test.rs
Your code doesn't run? sorry, you can take a look at what do run in the test folder.