cosmos72 / gomacro
- пятница, 13 июля 2018 г. в 06:51:19
Go
Interactive Go interpreter and debugger with REPL, Eval, generics and Lisp-like macros
gomacro is an almost complete Go interpreter, implemented in pure Go. It offers both an interactive REPL and a scripting mode, and does not require a Go toolchain at runtime (except in one very specific case: import of a 3rd party package at runtime).
It has two dependencies beyond the Go standard library: github.com/peterh/liner and golang.org/x/sys
Gomacro can be used as:
a standalone executable with interactive Go REPL, line editing and code completion:
just run gomacro from your command line, then type Go code. Example:
$ gomacro
[greeting message...]
gomacro> import "fmt"
gomacro> fmt.Println("hello, world!")
hello, world!
14 // int
<nil> // error
gomacro>
press TAB to autocomplete a word, and press it again to cycle on possible completions.
Line editing follows mostly Emacs: Ctrl+A or Home jumps to start of line, Ctrl+E or End jumps to end of line, Ald+D deletes word starting at cursor... For the full list of key bindings, see https://github.com/peterh/liner
a tool to experiment with Go generics: see Generics
a Go source code debugger: see Debugger
an interactive tool to make science more productive and more fun. If you use compiled Go with scientific libraries (physics, bioinformatics, statistics...) you can import the same libraries from gomacro REPL (immediate on Go 1.8+ and Linux or Go 1.10.2+ and Mac OS X, requires restarting on other platforms, see Importing packages below), call them interactively, inspect the results, feed them to other functions/libraries, all in a single session. The imported libraries will be compiled, not interpreted, so they will be as fast as in compiled Go.
For a graphical user interface on top of gomacro, see Gophernotes. It is a Go kernel for Jupyter notebooks and nteract, and uses gomacro for Go code evaluation.
a library that adds Eval() and scripting capabilities to your Go programs in few lines of code:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"reflect"
"github.com/cosmos72/gomacro/fast"
)
func RunGomacro(toeval string) reflect.Value {
interp := fast.New()
// for simplicity, only collect the first returned value
val, _ := interp.Eval(toeval)
return val
}
func main() {
fmt.Println(RunGomacro("1+1"))
}
Also, github issue #13 explains how to have your application's functions, variable, constants and types available in the interpreter.
Note: gomacro license is MPL 2.0, which imposes some restrictions on programs that use gomacro. See MPL 2.0 FAQ for common questions regarding the license terms and conditions.
a way to execute Go source code on-the-fly without a Go compiler:
you can either run gomacro FILENAME.go (works on every supported platform)
or you can insert a line #!/usr/bin/env gomacro at the beginning of a Go source file,
then mark the file as executable with chmod +x FILENAME.go and finally execute it
with ./FILENAME.go (works only on Unix-like systems: Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X ...)
a Go code generation tool: gomacro was started as an experiment to add Lisp-like macros to Go, and they are extremely useful (in the author's opinion) to simplify code generation. Macros are normal Go functions, they are special only in one aspect: they are executed before compiling code, and their input and output is code (abstract syntax trees, in the form of go/ast.Node)
Don't confuse them with C preprocessor macros: in Lisp, Scheme and now in Go, macros are regular functions written in the same programming language as the rest of the source code. They can perform arbitrary computations and call any other function or library: they can even read and write files, open network connections, etc... as a normal Go function can do.
Run gomacro -m -w FILENAMES to parse and expand macros in one or more files.
For each filename on the command line, gomacro will parse it, expand macros,
then create a corresponding FILENAME.go with the parsed and macroexpanded
imports, declarations and statements.
To parse and macroexpand all *.gomacro files in a directory, run gomacro -m -w DIRECTORY
Gomacro is pure Go, and in theory it should work on any platform supported by the Go compiler. The following combinations are tested and known to work:
The command
go get -u github.com/cosmos72/gomacro
downloads, compiles and installs gomacro and its dependencies
Almost complete.
The main limitations and missing features are:
var a = b; var b = 42The documentation also contains the full list of features and limitations
Compared to compiled Go, gomacro supports several extensions:
generics (experimental) - see Generics
an integrated debugger, see Debugger
configurable special commands. Type :help at REPL to list them,
and see cmd.go:37
for the documentation and API to define new ones.
untyped constants can be manipulated directly at REPL. Examples:
gomacro> 1<<100
{int 1267650600228229401496703205376} // untyped.Lit
gomacro> const c = 1<<100; c * c / 100000000000
{int 16069380442589902755419620923411626025222029937827} // untyped.Lit
This provides a handy arbitrary-precision calculator.
Note: operations on large untyped integer constants are always exact,
while operations on large untyped float constants are implemented with go/constant.Value,
and are exact as long as both numerator and denominator are <= 5e1232.
Beyond that, go/constant.Value switches from *big.Rat to *big.Float
with precision = 512, which can accumulate rounding errors.
If you need exact results, convert the untyped float constant to *big.Rat
(see next item) before exceeding 5e1232.
untyped constants can be converted implicitly to *big.Int, *big.Rat and *big.Float. Examples:
import "math/big"
var i *big.Int = 1<<1000 // exact - would overflow int
var r *big.Rat = 1.000000000000000000001 // exact - different from 1.0
var s *big.Rat = 5e1232 // exact - would overflow float64
var t *big.Rat = 1e1234 // approximate, exceeds 5e1232
var f *big.Float = 1e646456992 // largest untyped float constant that is different from +Inf
Note: every time such a conversion is evaluated, it creates a new value - no risk to modify the constant.
Be aware that converting a huge value to string, as typing f at REPL would do, can be very slow.
macros, quoting and quasiquoting (to be documented)
and slightly relaxed checks:
Some short, notable examples - to run them on non-Linux platforms, see Importing packages first.
go get gonum.org/v1/plot gonum.org/v1/plot/plotter gonum.org/v1/plot/vggomacromain()
If all goes well, it will create a file named "functions.png" in current directory containing the plotted functions.go get github.com/sverrirab/mandelbrot-gocd; cd go/src/github.com/sverrirab/mandelbrot-gogomacro -i mbrot.goinit(); main()Further examples are listed by Gophernotes
Gomacro supports the standard Go syntax import, including package renaming. Examples:
import "fmt"
import (
"io"
"net/http"
r "reflect"
)
Third party packages - i.e. packages not in Go standard library - can also be imported with the same syntax, as long as the package is already installed.
To install a package, follow its installation procedure: quite often it is the command go get PACKAGE-PATH
The next steps depend on the system you are running gomacro on:
If you are running gomacro on Linux or Mac OS X, import will then just work. Example:
$ go get gonum.org/v1/plot
$ gomacro
[greeting message...]
gomacro> import "gonum.org/v1/plot"
// debug: created file "/home/max/src/gomacro_imports/gonum.org/v1/plot/plot.go"...
// debug: compiling "/home/max/go/src/gomacro_imports/gonum.org/v1/plot/plot.go" ...
gomacro> plot.New()
&{...} // *plot.Plot
<nil> // error
Note: internally, gomacro will compile and load a Go plugin containing the package's exported declarations. Go plugins require Go 1.8+ on Linux and Go 1.10.2+ on Mac OS X.
WARNING On Mac OS X, never execute strip gomacro: it breaks plugin support,
and loading third party packages stops working.
On all other systems as Windows, Android and *BSD you can still use import, but there are some more steps.
Example:
$ go get gonum.org/v1/plot
$ gomacro
[greeting message...]
gomacro> import "gonum.org/v1/plot"
// warning: created file "/home/max/go/src/github.com/cosmos72/gomacro/imports/thirdparty/gonum_org_v1_plot.go", recompile gomacro to use it
Now quit gomacro, recompile and reinstall it:
gomacro> :quit
$ go install github.com/cosmos72/gomacro
Finally restart it. Your import is now linked inside gomacro and will work:
$ gomacro
[greeting message...]
gomacro> import "gonum.org/v1/plot"
gomacro> plot.New()
&{...} // *plot.Plot
<nil> // error
Note: if you need several packages, you can first import all of them,
then quit and recompile gomacro only once.
gomacro contains an experimental version of Go generics.
For the experience report written while implementing them, see doc/generics.md
They are in beta status, and at the moment only generic types and functions are supported. Syntax and examples:
template[T,U] type Pair struct { First T; Second U }
var pair Pair#[complex64, struct{}]
// equivalent:
pair := Pair#[complex64, struct{}] {}
template[T] func Sum(args ...T) T {
var sum T // exploit zero value of T
for _, elem := range args {
sum += elem
}
return sum
}
Sum#[int] // returns func(...int) int
Sum#[int] (1,2,3) // returns int(6)
Sum#[complex64] // returns func(...complex64) complex64
Sum#[complex64] (1.1+2.2i, 3.3) // returns complex64(4.4+2.2i)
Sum#[string] // returns func(...string) string
Sum#[string]("abc.","def.","xy","z") // returns "abc.def.xyz"
template[T,U] func Transform(slice []T, trans func(T) U) []U {
ret := make([]U, len(slice))
for i := range slice {
ret[i] = trans(slice[i])
}
return ret
}
Transform#[string,int] // returns func([]string, func(string) int) []int
// returns []int{3, 2, 1} i.e. the len() of each string in input slice:
Transform#[string,int]([]string{"abc","xy","z"}, func(s string) int { return len(s) })
// Partial and full specialization of templates are supported.
// Together with recursive templates, they also (incidentally)
// provide Turing completeness at compile-time:
// The following example uses recursion and full specialization
// to compute fibonacci sequence at compile time.
// general case: encode Fib#[N] in the length of array type.
template[N] type Fib [
len((*Fib#[N-1])(nil)) +
len((*Fib#[N-2])(nil)) ]int
template[] for[2] type Fib [1]int // specialization for Fib#[2]
template[] for[1] type Fib [1]int // specialization for Fib#[1]
const Fib30 = len((*Fib#[30])(nil)) // compile-time constant
Current limitations:
Observation: the compile-time Turing completeness provided by these C++-style templates is really poorly readable, for three reasons:
if must be written as template specialization, outside the main templateIn the author's opinion, compile-time Turing completeness is a very enticing feature for several use cases and for a non-trivial percentage of developers.
If the only way to get such feature is with poorly readable (ab)use of templates, the result is a lot of poorly readable template code.
If Turing-complete templates are ever added to Go (or any other language)
it is thus very important to also provide an alternative, more natural syntax
to perform Turing-complete computation at compile-time. An example
could be: const foo(args) where the function foo must respect certain
constraints (to be defined) in order to be callable at compile time.
For a more detailed discussion, see doc/generics.md.
Since version 2.6, gomacro also has an integrated debugger. There are three ways to enter it:
:debug STATEMENT-OR-FUNCTION-CALL at the prompt."break" or _ = "break" to your code, then execute it normally.In all cases, execution will be suspended and you will get a debug> prompt, which accepts the following commands:
step, next, finish, continue, env [NAME], inspect EXPR, list, print EXPR-OR-STATEMENT
Also,
print fully supports expressions or statements with side effects, including function calls and modifying local variables.env without arguments prints all global and local variables.Only interpreted statements can be debugged: expressions and compiled code will be executed, but you cannot step into them.
The debugger is quite new, and may have some minor glitches.
First of all, to experiment with Go :)
Second, to simplify Go code generation tools (keep reading for the gory details)
Problem: "go generate" and many other Go tools automatically create Go source code from some kind of description - usually an interface specifications as WSDL, XSD, JSON...
Such specification may be written in Go, for example when creating JSON marshallers/unmarshallers from Go structs, or in some other language, for example when creating Go structs from JSON sample data.
In both cases, a variety of external programs are needed to generate Go source code: such programs need to be installed separately from the code being generated and compiled.
Also, Go is currently lacking generics (read: C++-like templates) because of the rationale "we do not yet know how to do them right, and once you do them wrong everybody is stuck with them"
The purpose of Lisp-like macros is to execute arbitrary code while compiling, in particular to generate source code.
This makes them very well suited (although arguably a bit low level) for both purposes: code generation and C++-like templates, which are a special case of code generation - for a demonstration of how to implement C++-like templates on top of Lisp-like macros, see for example the project https://github.com/cosmos72/cl-parametric-types from the same author.
Building a Go interpreter that supports Lisp-like macros, allows to embed all these code-generation activities into regular Go source code, without the need for external programs (except for the intepreter itself).
As a free bonus, we get support for Eval()
Gomacro is distributed under the terms of Mozilla Public License 2.0 or any later version.