Shared object / DLL support

[seadra]

gc compiler has -buildmode=c-shared. With LLVM, this should be possible, no?

[aykevl]

Yes, this is certainly possible. It's just that no one has asked for it yet. It will need the extra -buildmode flag and some extra hooks, like an extra -static flag to the linker and an extra hook to let the compiler emit PIC code instead of static code:

https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/blob/5569cd1b6b3aff8f52052d5ff1028d9bb87fba24/compiler/compiler.go#L105

[JasonWeise]

This would be a great addition. I am calling a Go library from Rust and would love to see it compiled with TinyGo instead.

Looking forward to this implementation :)

[sowelipililimute]

Yes, this is certainly possible. It's just that no one has asked for it yet. It will need the extra -buildmode flag and some extra hooks, like an extra -static flag to the linker and an extra hook to let the compiler emit PIC code instead of static code:

https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/blob/5569cd1b6b3aff8f52052d5ff1028d9bb87fba24/compiler/compiler.go#L105

Is adding this really all that needs to be done? Seems like there would be more to do...

[aykevl]

It's likely some more plumbing needs to be done but that's the essence of it I think.

[ansiwen]

I'm using go with c-shared for building a small plugin .so, that basically only calls a rest API. So it mainly uses the http client and json parser. Because of the runtime, it's quite big. I think it would be very useful to compile this with tinygo instead.

[riaan-dau]

We have an existing C-codebase running bare-metal on 32-bit ARM and would like to make use of the -buildmode=c-archive flag to build a static Go library callable from C. Would this be possible if this feature is implemented?

[Jimmy2099]

It's almost 2023, how is going to support generate .dll or .lib

[wayneforrest]

I am also interested in this feature.

I am using a go .dll / .lib, called from C++; and the DLL is 13MB, while the C++ code is only 1.5MB.

[31]

The Go c-shared support doesn't allow dlclose (or FreeLibrary on Windows), which makes it not ideal for plugins that need to be reloaded. I don't see any reason it'd be easier to support this with TinyGo than Go, but maybe this scenario has more value here? Go issue about this:

• https://github.com/golang/go/issues/11100