mobile VS TinyGo

Currently I am learning golang. And I just thought why not create an Android app in GoLang... And luckly I stumbled upon this GitHub repo: https://github.com/golang/mobile - checked the docs but was not able to comprehend the terms: native, SDK apps, stuff...

If you use C#, Java, or Node.js for developing your backend, you may have to rewrite the same existing business logic in Dart on the Flutter frontend. The Go mobile project offers a way to call Go code from the platform-specific mobile development environments, i.e., Java and Android.

NDK is a fairly cursed thing dude, depending on your background I can suggest either looking at how golang interop is implemented (here or here), or going for flutter/dart ffi.

The other way is waaaay more complex, run a IPFS node directly on the android phone with their go-ipfs lib and making use of go mobile lib. Check this one https://github.com/cusspvz/react-native-ipfs

This part is one that I struggled the most with as the gomobile package is unstable and also lacks documentation and guides (as we all could have guessed that it's rarely used in a practical sense).

Reading through the documentation, you will understand why this plugin is called "tiny," i.e., the SDK uses the TinyGo compiler instead of the official Go compiler. You can read more about why this is the case on the SDK\'s overview page, but the TLDR version is that the Go compiler can only produce Wasm binaries that run in the browser.

Not only you can fit Go into a kernel, there is at least two products that do so.

TamaGo, used to write the firmware used in USB armory.

https://www.withsecure.com/en/solutions/innovative-security-...

TinyGo, which even has official Arduino and ARM support, and is sponsored by Google

https://tinygo.org/

Ah but that isn't proper Go! Well neither is the C code that is allowed to be used in typical kernel code, almost nothing from ISO C standard library is available, and usually plenty of compiler specific language extensions are used instead.

Reminds me of https://tinygo.org/ - a project that brings Golang to embedded devices, browser (wasm) contexts. Do you converge or diverge from that project?

You should also consider TinyGo. It can compile Go for the Pico, and is starting to get good device support.

Thankfully some folks completly ignored whatever the rest of the world thinks system programming is all about and created:

- TinyGo (https://tinygo.org/), which is acknowledged by people in the industry[0][1]

- TamaGo unikernel on USB Armory secure key (https://www.withsecure.com/de/solutions/innovative-security-...)

And then there is the question if writing compilers, assemblers, linkers is systems programming or not.

[0]-https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/08/28/tinygo-go-compiler-f...

[1]-https://twitter.com/ArmSoftwareDev/status/131680481331796787...

Have you seen TinyGo? In the case of embedded system I would probably still chose C over Rust if the system didn't support dynamic memory allocation, and most embedded systems do not.

>I really hate how for microcontrollers the only two choices are either C++ or Micropython

There's TinyGo as well. https://tinygo.org/

Gist link fixed, thanks. Compared to TinyGo, Go with GOOS=wasip1 will probably generate larger artifacts (at least, for now). This is because it bundles the entire Go runtime. The benefit is that it fully supports goroutine scheduling and non-blocking I/O. TinyGo (I believe) still uses a custom asyncify pass and does not support non-blocking I/O nor basic WASI networking (e.g. https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/pull/2748 never landed, but GOOS=wasip1 supports it).