Solod: Go can be a better C

6 comments

• aarvin_roshin 28 minutes ago
  The author's original blog post, which goes into some more detail: https://antonz.org/solod
• faangguyindia 10 minutes ago
  i've been using Go on backend now all the time.

  Wish something like this existed instead i am stuck with flutter and react native on Mobile.

  When will a time come when i can use some functional languages like Haskell or a plain boring language like Go for making apps with OTA ability for mobiles.

  As vibe coding takes over, app store approval will become slowerer and OTA is really great when you need to make quick changes!

  You can OTA each day and do base app release to store once each week.

  i think this maybe the space where very little work is being done.
• bb88 1 hour ago
  How does it deal with pointers if everything is stack based? You can't really return a pointer to something on the stack because it could get overwritten between when you return it and when you access it.
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  • wrs 26 minutes ago
    Exactly as well as C does, it seems.

        func newPerson() *Person {
            p := Person{Name: "Alice", Age: 30}
            return &p
        }
    

    becomes

        static main_Person* newPerson(void) {
            main_Person p = (main_Person){.Name = so_str("Alice"), .Age = 30};
            return &p;
        }
    

    Quoting the FAQ: "So itself has few safeguards other than the default Go type checking. It will panic on out-of-bounds array access, but it won't stop you from returning a dangling pointer or forgetting to free allocated memory. Most memory-related problems can be caught with AddressSanitizer in modern compilers, so I recommend enabling it during development by adding -fsanitize=address to your CFLAGS."

    So saying you get the "safety of Go" is a bit of a stretch.
  • zabzonk 59 minutes ago
    Well, it does say:

    "Everything is stack-allocated by default; heap is opt-in through the standard library."

    So it supports both stack and heap, and I guess static allocation too.
• leecommamichael 1 hour ago
  I really like this idea. I was reading a post earlier about how Go generics are implemented, and how they're sort of leveraging root GC-types in the "runtime" to avoid the same bloat as monomorphization causes in, say, C++. I wonder how Solod will do that? I guess plain monomorphization? I guess that's fine since C compilers are so speedy.
• heyitsdaad 42 minutes ago
  Insert Look What They Need To Mimic A Fraction Of Our Power meme here.
• jay_kyburz 25 minutes ago
  I've been using Go and Raylib to make a game lately and I really don't have a problem with garbage collection. It's so fast that it's not having an impact on my frame rate.

  I was a little worried at the start because nobody would normally consider Go for games, but I did a bunch of tests and found it's just no big deal.

  (I'm focused on game play and not interested in pushing hardware to its limits.)

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  • SarikayaKomzin 19 minutes ago
    I’ve been considering using Odin and Raylib for this because of its similarities to Go, but using Go itself is appealing. Do you have any good resources for what you’ve learned, or is it an unexplored frontier?