Proposal for a Go Interpreter

&gt; To provide an interpreter that can embed inside a Go application, in order to provide scriptability to the Go ecosystem at large.<p>Can we move away from scripting engines at some point. They are big black boxes that you throw characters into and then &quot;things&quot; happen that you have no control over.<p>* What if I <i>don&#x27;t</i> want the security?<p>* What if I want more security?<p>* What if I want actual pointers?<p>* What if I want to do one of a million things that don&#x27;t fall into the original assumptions about what a Go interpreter would do?<p>Compiler-as-a-service is the future. A high quality parse tree, with a built-in interpreter or possibly JITter. Refactoring tools and tons of other cool things can be built instead of the same old black box.<p>If it&#x27;s just going to be another plain-old interpreter, it would be best to instead focus on integrating V8 because a Go interpreter would bring far less to the table (notably interpreters are typically slow and one of the big benefits of Go is that it can be fast).

FYI: To view it without the &#x27;suggestions&#x27; just go to the right and change your own mode to view. Then the stupid changes other are suggesting wont show.

Go is a great language. But why on Earth would you want to script with it?

That would be totally amazing. I played with the idea of letting clients run custom code on my servers but that didn&#x27;t materialize so far due to the amount of work required to safely allow that. Being able to do that easily would certainly make online tools more configurable for power-users - or let an application-economy flourish where users can share small snippets that customizes a service in given ways.<p>For reference, I run a website analyzing service that crawls websites every week or so and reports errors, mainly broken links. As all the document sources are available at TCP level it would be trivial to extend it with custom error reporting.

&gt; <i>Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the crowd clears. [Try again] [Dismiss]</i><p>Tangential question: Is it documented anywhere how many simultaneous users a Google Doc can have?

Given how fast go code compiles, I wonder how many use-cases for interpreted Go code would be solved by a good plugin system? Certainly for the use-cases where I would use this proposal, I&#x27;d be just as happy (if not happier) with a plugin system - which is probably a bunch less effort to implement, too.<p>There was originally a proposal for a fairly promising plugin architecture for 1.5 - it didn&#x27;t make the cut, in the end, but there might be some PoC bits out there if anyone&#x27;s interested.

I used to use Lua a bit for scripting, so I was thinking about that as a scripting language for golang too.<p>After some discussion with a friend, we decide that a golang interpreter would be the best solution though. It could allow you to use channels to communicate between the interpreted and compiled sides of the app. Spawning goroutines on either side would also be handy.<p>However, that was yet one more project on my list of side projects that I haven&#x27;t gotten to... So it is nice to see some interest in this idea.

I was surprised the GoRe REPL [1] was not in the list of existing tools [2]?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;motemen&#x2F;gore" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;motemen&#x2F;gore</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sbinet&#x2F;notes-and-todos&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;README.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sbinet&#x2F;notes-and-todos&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;README...</a>

Go is one of the fastest compilers around. I think compile-speed was one of the design-goals. Hence, what additional benefit would an interpreter have?

Please stop with the vandalism.

Why would there be &quot;legal issues may restrict use of an interpreter in iOS applications&quot;?

Here is a potentially more urgent idea: Create a transpiler Javascript to Go. Now THAT would get my attention.