Link go program vs GNU readline statically

Question

I'm writing a Go program that uses the GNU readline library for a fancy command line interface. In order to simplify the installing process and not worry about the library version and other stuff, I want to link it statically.

The problem is I don't really know how to do it. If I precompile the library, I would have to provide several versions of my code, with the different versions of the .a or .lib readline library. To avoid this problem I was thinking of just including the current readline code to my go project, and let the go tool compile it when it build the go project. However, to build the readline library, is necessary to use make. Is there a way of telling the go tool how to build the C code?

Answer 1

Yes, you can certainly do that. I've recently done something similar with a different project, mainly because the code was not available as a library (Ubuntu compiles just the command line tool for it). To achieve it, I've run the autoconf script with options that I figured would be sensible in most systems, and copied the C code together with the automatically built config.h header file into the Go package directory. Then, I've built the original C code with make once and observed which options gcc would get while compiling and linking it, and copied the appropriate ones into cgo's LDFLAGS and CFLAGS options (you can also inspect the Makefile, but that was easier).

A couple of side notes:

• Have you considered doing the readline work in Go itself? The ssh terminal package works at least as a pretty good seed, if it doesn't solve your problem completely.

• Remember that readline, although being a library, is GPL. You'll necessarily have to license your own software as GPL as well if you link or embed it. There are other smilar libraries available with less strict licenses, if you care.

Answer 2

I recommend avoiding readline, better alternatives exist; like https://github.com/edsrzf/fineline