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Problems & Solutions for Interaction Between C and Go

At Vimeo, on the transcoding team, we work a lot with Go, and a lot with C, for various tasks such as media ingest. This means we use CGO quite extensively, and consequently, have run into bits that are perhaps not very well documented, if at all. Below is my effort to document some of the problems we've run into, and how we fixed or worked around them.

Many of these are obviously wrong in retrospect, but hindsight is 20/20, and these problems do exist in many codebases currently.

Some are definitely ugly, and I much welcome better solutions! Tweet me at @daemon404 if you have any, or have your own CGO story/tips, please! I'd love to learn of them.

Table of Contents

	# Change these variables as necessary.
	main_package_path = ./cmd/example
	binary_name = example

	# ==================================================================================== #
	# HELPERS
	# ==================================================================================== #

	## help: print this help message
	.PHONY: help

	#!/usr/bin/env bash

	set -Eeuo pipefail
	trap cleanup SIGINT SIGTERM ERR EXIT

	script_dir=$(cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" &>/dev/null && pwd -P)

	usage() {
	cat <<EOF
	Usage: $(basename "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}") [-h] [-v] [-f] -p param_value arg1 [arg2...]

	# <type>: <subject> (Max 50 char, Why is this change necessary?)
	# \|<---- Using a Maximum Of 50 Characters ---->\|

	# \|<---- Try To Limit Each Line to a Maximum Of 72 Characters ---->\|
	# Explain how the commit addresses the issue

	# IMPORTANT!! Describe any side effects of the change.

	# Provide links or keys to any relevant tickets, articles or other resources
	# Examples: "Jira issue [ABC-123]" or "Closes Github issue #123"


	# Go parameters
	GOCMD=go
	GOBUILD=$(GOCMD) build
	GOCLEAN=$(GOCMD) clean
	GOTEST=$(GOCMD) test
	GOGET=$(GOCMD) get
	BINARY_NAME=mybinary
	BINARY_UNIX=$(BINARY_NAME)_unix