Skip to Main Content
The Go Programming Language
book

The Go Programming Language

by Alan A. A. Donovan, Brian W. Kernighan
October 2015
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
400 pages
14h 44m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from The Go Programming Language

13.4 Calling C Code with cgo

A Go program might need to use a hardware driver implemented in C, query an embedded database implemented in C++, or use some linear algebra routines implemented in Fortran. C has long been the lingua franca of programming, so many packages intended for widespread use export a C-compatible API, regardless of the language of their implementation.

In this section, we’ll build a simple data compression program that uses cgo, a tool that creates Go bindings for C functions. Such tools are called foreign-function interfaces (FFIs), and cgo is not the only one for Go programs. SWIG (swig.org) is another; it provides more complex features for integrating with C++ classes, but we won’t show it here.

The compress/... ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

The Rust Programming Language, 2nd Edition

The Rust Programming Language, 2nd Edition

Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols
Programming Rust, 2nd Edition

Programming Rust, 2nd Edition

Jim Blandy, Jason Orendorff, Leonora F. S. Tindall

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780134190570Purchase book