Go 1.24's go tool is one of the best additions to the ecosystem in years

https://www.jvt.me/posts/2025/01/27/go-tools-124/

by keybits • 1 year ago

290 185 1 year ago

As someone who’s been using Go since 2013 at commpanies like Apple, Microsoft, and Uber, this all seems quite unnecessary.

That said, if it helps people do “their thing” in what they believe is an easier (more straightforward) way, then I welcome the new changes.

teeray2• 1 year ago

Given Go’s approach to “metaprogramming” has long relied on tools written in Go, this does seem like a feature gap that needed closing. Even the introduction of `go generate` long ago formalized this approach, but still left installing the tools as an exercise for the reader. You can’t have consistent code gen if you don’t have consistent tooling across a team/CI.

9rx• 1 year ago

Even the introduction of `go generate` long ago formalized this approach

It did, but if you recall it came with a lot of "We have no idea why you need this" from Pike and friends. Which, of course, makes sense when you remember that they don't use the go toolchain inside Google. They use Google's toolchain, which already supports things like code generation and build dependency management in a far more elegant way. Had Go not transitioned to a community project, I expect we would have seen the same "We have no idea why you need this" from the Go project as that is another thing already handled by Google's tooling.

The parent's experience comes from similar sized companies as Google who have similar kinds of tooling as Google. His question comes not from a "why would you need this kind of feature?" in concept, but more of a "why would you not use the tooling you already have?" angle. And, to be fair, none of this is needed where you have better tooling, but the better tooling we know tends to require entire teams to maintain it, which is unrealistic for individuals to small organizations. So, this is a pretty good half-measure to allow the rest of us to play the same game in a smaller way.

GauntletWizard• 1 year ago

I am both strongly of the opinion that this was already done much better in Bazel, and that the go-native version seems clean, clear, and simple and should probably be adopted by pure go shops.

The digraph problem of build tooling is hardly new, though the ability to checksum all of your build tools and executables and mid-outputs to assure consistency is relatively new to feasibility. Bazel is a heavy instrument and making it work as well as it does was a hard problem even for Google. I don't know anyone making the same investment, and doubt it makes the slightest hint of sense for anyone outside the fortune 500.

syvolt5• 1 year ago

I have tested it and probably will use it but the fact that it pollutes your go.mod's indirect dependency list (without any distinction indicating it's for a tool) is very annoying.

jamietanna5• 1 year ago

Yeah, I'm still rather excited about it, but less-so given it /does/ impact the `go.mod` for consumers

movedx2• 1 year ago

What solution would you propose?

rplnt• 1 year ago

At least a comment if not its own section.

arccy10• 1 year ago

There's module graph pruning https://go.dev/ref/mod#graph-pruning

cirwin2• 1 year ago

Primary contributor to the feature here.

We went back on forth on this a lot, but it boiled down to wanting only one dependency graph per module instead of two. This simplifies things like security scanners, and other workflows that analyze your dependencies.

A `// tool` comment would be a nice addition, it's probably not impossible to add, but the code is quite fiddly.

Luckily for library authors, although it does impact version selection for projects who use your module; those projects do not get `// indirect` lines in their go.mod because those packages are not required when building their module.

syvolt5• 1 year ago

Thank you for working on it. It is a nice feature and still better than alternatives.

I'm not a library author and I try to be careful about what dependencies I introduce to my projects (including indirect dependencies). On one project, switching to `go tool` makes my go.mod go from 93 lines to 247 (excluding the tools themselves) - this makes it infeasible to manually review.

If I'm only using a single feature of a multi-purpose tool for example, does it matter to me that some unrelated dependency of theirs has a security issue?

caust1c2• 1 year ago

Having not looked at it deeply yet, why require building every time it's invoked? Is the idea to get it working then add build caching later? Seems like a pretty big drawback (bigger than the go.mod pollution, for me). Github runners are sllooooow so build times matter to me.

eadmund• 1 year ago

it boiled down to wanting only one dependency graph per module instead of two

Did you consider having tool be an alias for indirect? That would have kept a single dependency graph per module, while still enabling one reading one’s go.mod by hand rather than using ‘go mod’ to know where each dependency came from and why?

I know, a random drive-by forum post is not the same as a technical design …

remram2• 1 year ago

So it's just dev-dependencies?

jamietanna5• 1 year ago

Yep, that's the intent

the_gipsy• 1 year ago

lol yea

silverwind• 1 year ago

Yes, except it does not support version ranges.

verdverm6• 1 year ago

Go uses Minimum Version Selection (MVS) instead of a SAT solver. There are no ranges in any go dependency specifications. It's actually a very simple and elegant algorithm for dependency version selection

https://research.swtch.com/vgo-mvs

nikolayasdf12311• 1 year ago

a bit worse. it is all mixed up. to keep separate dependency tree for tools need use old approach with go.mod. it is actually even worse now.

nikolayasdf12311• 1 year ago

UPD:

1. it is single tree

2. BUT tools will not propagate through the dependency tree downstream due to go module pruning

check this comment: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/48429#issuecomment-26184...

official docs: https://tip.golang.org/doc/modules/managing-dependencies#too...

Due to module pruning, when you depend on a module that itself has a tool dependency, requirements that exist just to satisfy that tool dependency do not usually become requirements of your module.

imiric• 1 year ago

This seems handy, but often the tools run by `go generate` are outside of the Go ecosystem, or need to be binaries.

So I think a general solution would work better, and not be limited to Go. There are plenty of tools in this space to choose from: mise, devenv, Nix, Hermit, etc.

arccy10• 1 year ago

better motivation for rewrite it in go...

but are there really that many tools you need in a go project not written in go?

TheCondor• 1 year ago

Mise is right on the edge of being pretty killer. I’m bullish on it. It also includes a lot of nice to haves that you can declare, like k9s, which isn’t exactly a dev tool but becomes expected

bjackman3• 1 year ago

I always think it's a shame that these features end up getting built into ecosystem-specific build tools. Why do we need separate build systems for every language? It seems entirely possible to have build system that can do all this stuff for every language at once.

From my experience at Google I _know_ this is possible in a Megamonorepo. I have briefly fiddled with Bazel and it seems there's quite a barrier to entry, I dunno if that's just lack of experience but it didn't quite seem ready for small projects.

Maybe Nix is the solution but that has barrier to entry more at the human level - it just seems like a Way of Life that you have to dive all the way into.

Nonetheless, maybe I should try diving into one or both of those tools at some point.

sunshowers5• 1 year ago

(I worked on source control at FB for many years.)

The main argument for not overly genericizing things is that you can deliver a better user experience through domain-specific code.

For Bazel and buck2 specifically, they require a total commitment to it, which implies ongoing maintenance work. I also think the fact that they don't have open governance is a hindrance. Google's and Meta's internal monorepos make certain tradeoffs that don't quite work in a more distributed model.

Bazel is also in Java I believe, which is a bit unfortunate due to process startup times. On my machine, `time bazelisk --help` takes over 0.75 seconds to run, compared to `time go --help` which is 0.003 seconds and `time cargo --help` which is 0.02 seconds. (This doesn't apply to buck2, which is in Rust.)

jeffbee2• 1 year ago

This is likely because you are running it in some random PWD that doesn't represent a bazel workspace. When running in a workspace the bazel daemon persists. Inside my workspace the bazelisk --help invocation needs just 30ms real time.

Running bazel outside of a bazel workspace is not a major use-case that needs to be fixed.

spockz2• 1 year ago

GraalVM’s native image has been a thing for a while now. This could overcome the daemon issue partially. The daemon does more ofc by as it keeps some state in memory. But at least the binary start time is a solved problem in Java land.

6keZbCECT2uB3• 1 year ago

I agree. In my opinion, if you can keep the experience of Bazel limited to build targets, there is a low barrier to entry even if it is tedious. Major issues show up with Bazel once you start having to write rules, tool chains, or if your workspace file talks to the Internet.

I think you can fix these issues by using a package manager around Bazel. Conda is my preferred choice because it is in the top tier for adoption, cross platform support, and supported more locked down use cases like going through mirrors, not having root, not controlling file paths, etc. What Bazel gets from this is a generic solution for package management with better version solving for build rules, source dependencies and binary dependencies. By sourcing binary deps from conda forge, you get a midpoint between deep investment into Bazel and binaries with unknown provenance which allows you to incrementally move to source as appropriate.

Additional notes: some requirements limit utility and approach being partial support of a platform. If you require root on Linux, wsl on Windows, have frequent compilation breakage on darwin, or neglect Windows file paths, your cross platform support is partial in my book.

Use of Java for Bazel and Python for conda might be regrettable, but not bad enough to warrant moving down the list of adoption and in my experience there is vastly more Bazel out there than Buck or other competitors. Similarly, you want to see some adoption from Haskell, Rust, Julia, Golang, Python, C++, etc.

JavaScript is thorny. You really don't want to have to deal with multiple versions of the same library with compiled languages, but you have to with JavaScript. I haven't seen too much demand for JavaScript bindings to C++ wrappers around a Rust core that uses C core libraries, but I do see that for Python bindings.

sunshowers5• 1 year ago

You really don't want to have to deal with multiple versions of the same library with compiled languages, but you have to with JavaScript.

Rust handles this fine by unifying up to semver compatibility -- diamond dependency hell is an artifact of the lack of namespacing in many older languages.

jlarsen• 1 year ago

I've had exactly the same thought, after hitting walls repeatedly with limitations in single-language ecosystems. And likewise, I've had the same concerns around the complexity that comes with Bazel/Buck/Nix.

It's been such a frustration for me that I started writing my own as a side project a year or two ago, based on a using a standardized filesystem structure for packages instead of a manifest or configuration language. By leaning into the filesystem heavily, you can avoid a lot of language lock-in and complexity that comes with other tools. And with fingerprint-based addressing for packages and files, it's quite fast. Incremental rebuild checks for my projects with hundreds of packages take only 200-300ms on my low-end laptop with an Intel N200 and mid-tier SSD.

It's an early stage project and the documentation needs some work, but if you're interested: https://github.com/somesocks/dryad https://somesocks.github.io/dryad/

One other alternative I know of that's multi-language is Pants(https://www.pantsbuild.org/), which has support for packages in several languages, and an "ad-hoc" mode which lets you build packages with a custom tool if it isn't officially supported. They've added support for quite a few new tools/languages lately, and seem to be very much an active project.

8n4vidtmkvmk2• 1 year ago

Not loving the cutesy names (https://somesocks.github.io/dryad/docs/02-concepts/01-the-ga...). I want my build tool to be boring.

munificent• 1 year ago

I think the problem is basically because the build system has to be implemented using some ecosystem, and no other ecosystem wants to depend on that one.

If your "one build system to rule them all" was built in, say, Ruby, the Python ecosystem won't want to use it. No Python evangelist wants to tell users that step 1 of getting up and running with Python is "Install Ruby".

So you tend to get a lot of wheel reinvention across ecosystems.

I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. Yes, it's a lot of redundant work. But it's also an opportunity to shed historical baggage and learn from previous mistakes. Compare, for example, how beloved Rust's cargo ecosystem is compared the ongoing mess that is package management in Python.

A fresh start can be valuable, and not having a monoculture can be helpful for rapid evolution.

marwis• 1 year ago

Sounds like the only way out of this is to design language agnostic tooling protocols that anybody can implement.

pansa2• 1 year ago

No Python evangelist wants to tell users that step 1 of getting up and running with Python is "Install Ruby".

True, but the Python community does seem to be coalescing around tools like UV and Ruff, written in Rust. Presumably that’s more acceptable because it’s a compiled language, so they tell users to “install UV” not “install Rust”.

6keZbCECT2uB3• 1 year ago

Partly in jest, you can often find a Perl / bash available where you can't find a Python, Ruby, or Cargo.

lihaoyi• 1 year ago

My experience with Bazel is it does everything you need, and works incredibly well once set up, but is ferociously complex and hard to learn and get started with. Buck and Pants are easier in some ways, but fundamentally they still look and feel mostly like Bazel, warts and all

I've been working on an alternate build tool Mill (https://www.mill-build.org) tries to provide the 90% of Bazel that people need at 10% the complexity cost. From a greenfield perspective a lot of work to try and catch up to Bazel's cross-language support and community. I think we can eventually get there, but it will be a long slog

pornel2• 1 year ago

Why do we need separate build systems for every language?

Because being cross-language makes them inherit all of the complexity of the worst languages they support.

The infinite flexibility required to accommodate everyone keeps costing you at every step.

You need to learn a tool that is more powerful than your language requires, and pay the cost of more abstraction layers than you need.

Then you have to work with snowflake projects that are all different in arbitrary ways, because the everything-agnostic tool didn't impose any conventions or constraints.

The vague do-it-all build systems make everything more complicated than necessary. Their "simple" components are either a mere execution primitive that make handling different platforms/versions/configurations your problem, or are macros/magic/plugins that are a fractal of a build system written inside a build system, with more custom complexity underneath.

OTOH a language-specific build system knows exactly what that language needs, and doesn't need to support more. It can include specific solutions and workarounds for its target environments, out of the box, because it knows what it's building and what platforms it supports. It can use conventions and defaults of its language to do most things without configuration. General build tools need build scripts written, debugged, and tweaked endlessly.

A single-language build tool can support just one standard project structure and have all projects and dependencies follow it. That makes it easier to work on other projects, and easier to write tooling that works with all of them. All because focused build system doesn't accommodate all the custom legacy projects of all languages.

You don't realize how much of a skill-and-effort black hole build scripts are is until you use a language where a build command just builds it.

bjackman3• 1 year ago

But this just doesn't match my experience with Blaze at all. For my internal usage with C++ & Go it's perfect. For the weird niche use case of building and packaging BPF programs (with no support from the central tooling teams, we had to write our own macros) it still just works. For Python where it's a poor fit for the language norms it's a minor inconvenience but still mostly stays out of the way. I hear Java is similar.

For vendored open source projects that build with random other tools (CMake, Nix, custom Makefile) it's a pain but the fact that it's generally possible to get them building with Blaze at all says something...

Yes, the monorepo makes all of this dramatically easier. I can consider "one-build-tool-to-rule-them-all isn't really practical outside of a monorepo" as a valid argument, although it remains to be proven. But "you fundamentally need a build tool per language" doesn't hold any water for me.

That makes it easier to work on other projects, and easier to write tooling that works with all of them.

But... this is my whole point. Only if those projects are in the same language as yours! I can see how maybe that's valid in some domains where there's probably a lot of people who can just do almost everything on JS/TS, maybe Java has a similar domain. But for most of us switching between Go/Cargo/CMake etc is a huge pain.

Oh btw, there's also Meson. That's very cross-language while also seeming extremely simple to use. But it doesn't seem to deliver a very full-featured experience.

morepedantic• 1 year ago

Brazil performs dependency resolution in a language-agnostic way.

https://gist.github.com/terabyte/15a2d3d407285b8b5a0a7964dd6...

wordofx• 1 year ago

Are we just copying .NET now?

movedx2• 1 year ago

What’s wrong with copying from other projects if they’re indeed offering good ideas worth copying? You say it as if the Golang community MUST only ever have unique ideas no one else has ever thought of — something that’s increasingly rare and unlikely.

Cthulhu_5• 1 year ago

To be snide, .NET was copying Java, Java was copying C, etc etc etc.

I don't understand your comment when you should know copying proven features is a good thing.

purpleidea2• 1 year ago

go.mod and the golang tooling is a horror show. I absolutely LOVE the language, but dealing with the tooling is horrendous. I should blog about the specifics, but if you want a short version:

* not using posix args

* obscure incantations to run tests

* go.mod tooling is completely non-deterministic and hard to use, they should have just left the old-style vendor/ alone (which worked perfectly) and wrapped a git-submodules front-end on top for everyone who was afraid of submodules. Instead they reinvented this arcane new ecosystem.

If you want to rewrite the golang tooling, I'll consult on this for free.

verdverm6• 1 year ago

MVS, the algo for dep version selection, is deterministic, given the same inputs you will get the same outputs. Go has invested a lot of effort in creating reproducible builds through the entire toolchain

https://research.swtch.com/vgo-mvs

purpleidea2• 1 year ago

The _tooling_ is not reproducible. Take a not small golang project with some number of dependencies and there should be a single list of the latest versions for the entire project. And exactly what golang commands do you run to generate that list? It's totally broken. This is why so many tools cropped up like go-mod-upgrade and so on.

Everyone downvoting obviously doesn't understand the problem.

dprotaso• 1 year ago

Funny to see a little go library you wrote [1] show up in a blog post years later. I need to update it now that go has iterators and generics.

Another great blog post [2] covers performance issues with go tool

[1] https://github.com/dprotaso/go-yit

[2] https://blog.howardjohn.info/posts/go-tools-command/

amukher1• 1 year ago

Found this a lot easier to follow. https://blog.howardjohn.info/posts/go-tools-command/

And didn't quite understand the euphoria.

0x696C69612• 1 year ago

Yeah it's a nice QOL improvement. Not some game changer ...

Groxx2• 1 year ago

"Shared dependency state" was my very first thought when I heard about how it was built.

Yeah I want none of that. I'll stick with my makefiles and a dedicated "internal/tools" module. Tools routinely force upgrades that break other things, and allowing that is a feature.

nikolayasdf12311• 1 year ago

same. tools are not part of the codebase, nor dependencies.

you got to have isolation of artefact and tools around to work with it.

it is bonkers to start versioning tools used to build project mixed with artefact dependencies itself. should we include version of VSCode used to type code? how about transitive dependencies of VSCode? how about OS itself to edit files? how about version of LLM model that generated some of this code? where does this stop?

0x696C69612• 1 year ago

The way it's implemented is the way that almost everyone already does it. It's just more convenient now.

mook• 1 year ago

There's also the (draft) release notes: https://go.dev/doc/go1.24 And the docs: https://go.dev/doc/modules/managing-dependencies#tools

I've done the blank import thing before, it was kinda awkward but not _that_ bad.

gr4vityWall• 1 year ago

The feature itself seems reasonable and useful. Specially if most of your tooling is written is Go as well. But this part caught my attention:

user defined tools are compiled each time they are used

Why compile them each time they are used? Assuming you're compiling them from source, shouldn't they be compiled once, and then have the 'go tool' command reuse the same binaries? I don't see why it compiles them at the time you run the tool, rather than when you're installing dependencies. The benchmarks show a significant latency increase. The author also provided a different approach which doesn't seem to have any obvious downsides, besides not sharing dependency versions (which may or may not be a good thing - that's a separate discussion IMO).

kbolino5• 1 year ago

There is a cache and they're aren't re-compiled unless they change or the cache is cleared.

pragma_x3• 1 year ago

Ah, okay. So this achieves yet more feature parity with npm/yarn? Sweet.

pjmlp5• 1 year ago

This has been a thing in dotnet tool for years, now.

Cthulhu_5• 1 year ago

I think it's great that there's prior art that can be used as examples, proof of value, and opportunities for learning. I commend .NET for investing the resources in researching and developing this feature.

nikolayasdf12311• 1 year ago

proposal is closed and accepted by Go team. [~sigh]

you can still leave comments in discussion issue: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/48429

globular-toast• 1 year ago

A note for the author in case they are reading: "i.e." means "that is", "e.g." means "for example". You should be able to substitute these meanings and find the sentence makes sense. In all cases here you wanted "e.g.".

TheDong2• 1 year ago

I think it's a bad addition since it pushes people towards a worse solution to a common problem.

Using "go tool" forces you to have a bunch of dependencies in your go.mod that can conflict with your software's real dependency requirements, when there's zero reason those matter. You shouldn't have to care if one of your developer tools depends on a different version of a library than you.

It makes it so the tools themselves also are being run with a version of software they weren't tested with.

If, for example, you used "shell.nix" or a dockerfile with the tool built from source, the tool's dependencies would match it's go.mod.

Now they have to merge with your go.mod...

And then, of course, you _still_ need something like shell.nix or a flox environment (https://flox.dev/) since you need to control the version of go, control the version of non-go tools like "protoc", and so you already have a better solution to downloading and executing a known version of a program in most non-trivial repos.

Defletter• 1 year ago

Using "go tool" forces you to have a bunch of dependencies in your go.mod that can conflict with your software's real dependency requirements, when there's zero reason those matter. You shouldn't have to care if one of your developer tools depends on a different version of a library than you.

Heh, were the people who made 'go tool' the same people who made Maven? Would make sense :P

larusso3• 1 year ago

At least build time dependencies are separated from runtime dependencies.

arccy10• 1 year ago

control the go version with the `toolchain` directive, replace protoc with buf.build (which is way better anyway).

potamic• 1 year ago

Why do ecosystems continue to screw up dependency management in 2025? You would think the single most widely used feature by programmers everywhere would be a solved problem by now.

LinXitoW• 1 year ago

Go launched without any dependency management. Go people believe that anything non-trivial is either a useless abstraction, or too difficult for the average developer. So their solution is to simply not add it, and tell anyone claiming to need it that their mind has been poisoned by other languages...

Until that time when they realize everyone else was right, and they add an over simplified, bad solution to their "great" language.

herval2• 1 year ago

Go has been a masterclass in disparaging industry learnings as "unnecessary" (dep management, generics, null safety), then gradually bolting them into the language. It's kinda hilarious to watch.

devmor• 1 year ago

Because everyone has their own opinion about it, like most other standards.

Personally, I think the way PHP handles dependencies is vastly preferable to every other ecosystem I've developed in, for most types of development - but I know its somewhat inflexible approach would be a headache for some small percentage of developers too.

peterldowns2• 1 year ago

I agree — tools should be shared artifacts that the team downloads and can guarantee are the same for everyone. I usually setup a flake.nix for everyone but flox, earthly, devenv, jetify, are all great alternatives. Ideally your tools are declaratively configured and shared between your team and your CI/CD environment, too.

The `go tool` stuff has always seemed like a junior engineering hack — literally the wrong tool for the job, yeah sure it gets it working, but other than that it's gross.

arccy10• 1 year ago

well now it leans in to go's reproducible tooling so it's declaratively configured and shared between your team and your CI/CD environment too.

mseepgood• 1 year ago

Using "go tool" forces you to have a bunch of dependencies in your go.mod

No, it doesn't. You can use "go tool -modfile=tools.mod mytool" if you want them separate.

jen202• 1 year ago

This should almost certainly be the default recommendation.

jcmfernandes• 1 year ago

I built a simple tool to generate binstubs and work around this problem: https://github.com/jcmfernandes/go-tools-binstubs

However, having multiple tools share a single mod file still proves problematic occasionally, due to incompatible dependencies.

nijave2• 1 year ago

That seems like it should have been the default

nixosbestos• 1 year ago

I ask this out of curiosity, not accusation, do you work for Flox? Can't say I've ever seen it mentioned "in the wild".

carlthome• 1 year ago

Hehe, I was also wondering this.

TheDong2• 1 year ago

I do not, just aware of it as a hip tool in the general space of "I want to install and version tools per-project, but I don't want to learn the nix programming language"

jchw3• 1 year ago

Yep, unfortunately this concern was mostly shrugged off by the Go team when it was brought up (because it would've required a lot of work to fix IIRC, which I think is a bad excuse for such a problem). IMO, a `go tool` dependency should've worked exactly the same way that doing `go install ...` works with a specific @tag: it should resolve the dependencies for that tool completely independently. Because it doesn't, you really, really shouldn't use this mechanism for things like golangci-lint, unfortunately. In fact, I honestly just recommend not using it at all...

arccy10• 1 year ago

i think it's more an argument to not use the dumpster fire that is golangci-lint

puika• 1 year ago

My current approach has been setting GOBIN to a local project bin via direnv and go installing bins there. install commands themselves are cached by me with a naive checksum check for the install script itself when I run my commands. Therefore all `go install`s run in parallel if I edit the install script, and go decides what to reinstall or not. At this point I don't feel it's worth migrating to `go tool` having this setup, we'll see when it's stable

nikolayasdf12311• 1 year ago

what is also concerning, Go team years ago did small vote, small survey of positive occurrences, and decided to enforce it globally for anyone.

old design give people option to use `tools.go` approach, or other, or nothing at all. now they are enforcing this `tools.go` standard. Go looks to be moving into very restrictive territories.

what about surveying opposing views? what about people who did not use `tools.go`

what is going on in Google, Go team?

nikolayasdf12311• 1 year ago

UPD: check this github comment. https://github.com/golang/go/issues/48429#issuecomment-26184...

basically it go tool relies heavily on go module pruning, so transitive dependencies from tools are not propagated downstream.

also, official docs say this: https://tip.golang.org/doc/modules/managing-dependencies#too...

Due to module pruning, when you depend on a module that itself has a tool dependency, requirements that exist just to satisfy that tool dependency do not usually become requirements of your module.

arccy10• 1 year ago

you don't have to use this feature if you don't like it...

nikolayasdf12311• 1 year ago

I was so concerned, because it seemed to me "you will not have any other choice".

after digging deeper, it is alright

tumetab1• 1 year ago

I appreciate that "tools" that are used to build the final version of a module/cli/service are explicitly managed through go.mod.

I really dislike that now I'm going to have two problems, managing other tools installed through a makefile, e.g. lint, and managing tools "installed" through go.mod, e.g. mocks generators, stringify, etc.

I feel like this is not a net negative on the ecosystem again. Each release Golang team adds thing to manage and makes it harder to interact with other codebases. In this case, each company will have to decide if they want to use "go tool" and when to use it. Each time I clone an open source repo I'm going to have to check how they manage their tools.

rednafi3• 1 year ago

I like that Go decided to natively support this. But since it’s keeping the dev dependencies in the same go.mod, won’t it make the binary larger?

In Python’s uv, the pyproject.toml has separate sections for dev and prod dependencies. Then uv generates a single lock file where you can specify whether to install dev or prod deps.

But what happens if I run ‘go run’ or ‘go build’? Will the tools get into the final artifact?

I know Python still doesn’t solve the issue where a tool can depend on a different version of a library than the main project. But this approach in Go doesn’t seem to fix it either. If your tool needs an older version of a library, the single go.mod file forces the entire project to use the older version, even if the project needs—or can only support—a newer version of the dependency.

catlifeonmars• 1 year ago

won’t it make the binary larger?

No. The binary size is related to the number of dependencies you use in each main package (and the dependencies they use, etc). It does not matter how many dependencies you have in your go.mod.

rednafi3• 1 year ago

Ah, thanks. This isn't much of an upgrade from the `tools.go` convention, where the tools are underscore-imported. All it does is provide an indication in the `go.mod` file that some dependencies come from tools.

Plus, `go tool <tool-name>` is slower than `./bin/<tool-name>`. Not to mention, it doesn’t resolve the issue where tools might use a different version of a dependency than the app.

pqb• 1 year ago

In Python’s uv, the pyproject.toml has separate sections for dev and prod dependencies.

If you want, you can have multiple ".mod" files and set "-modifle=dev-env.mod" every time you run "go" binary with "run" or "build" command. For example, you can take what @mseepgood mentioned:

go tool -modfile=tools.mod mytool

Plus, in last versions of the Go we have workspaces [0][1]. It is yet another way to easily switch between various environments or having isolated modules in the monorepo.

[0] https://go.dev/blog/get-familiar-with-workspaces

[1] https://go.dev/doc/tutorial/workspaces

WuxiFingerHold• 1 year ago

I don't understand why it's a good idea to couple tooling or configuration or infrastructure (e.g. Aspire.NET, which I'm also not convinced of being a good idea) so tightly with the application. An application should not need to be aware of how whatever tools are implemented or how configuration or infrastructure is managed. The tooling should point to the application as dependency. The application should not have any dependency on tooling.

karel-3d• 1 year ago

I don't like this. When I install a tool, I want to use it with their dependency versions at the moment they released it.

When I use `go tool`, it uses whatever I have in go.mod; and, in the opposit way, it will update my go.mod for no real reason.

But some people do this right now with tools.go, so... whatever, it's a better version of tools.go pattern. And I can still do it my preffered way with `go install <tool>@version` in makefile. So, eh.

favadi• 1 year ago

It doesn't look like much of an improvement over `tools/tools.go` with blank imports like this:

``` //go:build tools

package tools

import ( _ "github.com/xxx/yyy" ... ) ```

indulona• 1 year ago

I wish Go Team would focus on performance rather thann adding new features that nobody asked for. The http stack is barely able to beat NodeJS these days, ffs.

hu3• 1 year ago

nodejs' v8 has millions of man hours spent in optimzation alone since half the internet frontend runs on v8, if not more.

Go being garbage collected and still beating v8 is one hell of an achievement.

If you need faster Go Http you're using the wrong tool.

int_19h2• 1 year ago

Go is a statically typed, AOT-compiled language, unlike V8. The kind of task that had countless hours of R&D poured into it for decades, much of it public research and open source code.

I'm not sure how GC is relevant here at all given that JS is also a garbage-collected language.

Cthulhu_5• 1 year ago

The Go HTTP stack is not optimized for raw performance though; there's a number of alternative HTTP stacks written in Go optimized for performance, like fasthttp (https://github.com/valyala/fasthttp). (source: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/)

Likewise, the standard library NodeJS http stack will not be as performant as a performance optimized alternative.

That said, if raw performance is your primary concern, neither Go nor NodeJS will be good enough. There's many more factors to consider.

johnisgood• 1 year ago

Agreed on fasthttp.

There's many more factors to consider.

Erlang / Elixir?

dankobgd2• 1 year ago

Since i started using nix devShells this is kind of useless. What if i have 1 tool that isn't go tool so what do i do with it? so i have that one "exception" and here we go again...

jen202• 1 year ago

And why is that tool always protoc?

dankobgd2• 1 year ago

Yeah you are right :) i mean i could use buf build but i think the problem is just more general.

Cthulhu_5• 1 year ago

This is actually a valid downside of Go, in that it has its own set of tools for things like debugging and whatnot instead of being compatible with existing tools.

gqgs• 1 year ago

I don't love the pollution in the go.mod or being forced to have multiple files to track dependencies.

Being able to run tools directly with go generate run [1] already works well enough and I frankly don't need see any benefits compared to it in this new approach.

[1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/42088

damnever• 1 year ago

I’m sick of Go modules, and now they want to pile the mess even higher.

Go 1.24's go tool is one of the best additions to the ecosystem in years

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