Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jrockway 2802 days ago
Your go code has to live in go's directory structure. If your project is github.com/jrockway/whatever, then your source code must live in ~/go/src/github.com/jrockway/whatever/<go files>. There is no other place you can put it (though you can change ~/go to something else by setting $GOPATH in your environment).

I assume what upsets people is that everything in go is in a global namespace. So if you have ~/foo-project with some go in it, that doesn't work; you can't import things from there and the compiler won't build it. Instead you have to position it in the "global" ~/go/src for anything to work.

I used to teach Perl classes and people were equally upset about the concept of @INC. They did not want to manage packages that way, and the programming language did not give them a choice. This is very off-putting to some people.

(Me, I don't care. Not having 8000 configuration options to let the compiler find some github project I'm using is wonderful, even if having to cd go; cd src; cd github.com; cd jrockway; cd project; is kind of a lot of typing to get to the thing you're working on. I have a bash alias to get there ;)
2 comments
weberc2 2802 days ago
One nit: it's not "global" because it comes from $GOPATH. If you want, you can create a project like this: `~/myproject/src/app/main.go` and it will work fine so long as you set `GOPATH=$HOME/myproject` for your current shell.
link
raziel2p 2802 days ago
It's not that trivial in my experience. I tried hacking my shell so that the `go` command would automatically set GOPATH for me, but then I also had to set GOBIN for some reason, and even then I had to move my repository from ~/code/myproject to ~/code/myproject/src/github.com/myuser/myproject - which is just hugely unnecessary.
link
malingo 2802 days ago
> cd go; cd src; cd github.com; cd jrockway; cd project; is kind of a lot of typing to get to the thing you're working on. I have a bash alias to get there

In addition to your bash alias for navigation, you can use the `autocd` option of bash so that from your home directory you can say `cd /project`.

You can also use the CDPATH variable for quick navigation into a deep directory structure like that.

link