mygo

mygo is an experimental toy Go preprocessor/transpiler that introduces the ? operator for more concise error handling. It aims to reduce boilerplate code by replacing verbose error checks with a single character.

For example, mygo transforms this:

s := hello()?

Into this:

s, err := hello()
if err != nil {
    return err
}

Installation

$ go install github.com/aisk/mygo@latest

Usage

Create a file named hello.mygo with the following content:

package main

import (
	"io"
	"os"
)

func hello() error {
	f := os.Open("hello.mygo")?
	defer f.Close()
	s := io.ReadAll(f)?
	println(string(s))
	return nil
}

func main() {
	hello()
}

mygo supports multiple ways to specify transpile targets:

# Transpile from stdin
$ cat hello.mygo | mygo > hello.go

# Transpile specific files
$ mygo hello.mygo

# Transpile all .mygo files in a directory (non-recursive)
$ mygo .

# Transpile all .mygo files recursively
$ mygo ./...

# Transpile all .mygo files in current directory recursively
$ mygo ...

The transpiled hello.go will contain:

package main

import (
	"io"
	"os"
)

func hello() error {
	f, err := os.Open("hello.mygo")
	if err != nil {
		return err
	}
	defer f.Close()
	s, err := io.ReadAll(f)
	if err != nil {
		return err
	}
	println(string(s))
	return nil
}

func main() {
	hello()
}

Design Principles

The goal of this project is to design a Go language extension with more syntactic sugar, implemented as a preprocessor. The precompiled result is completely standard Go code, indistinguishable from hand-written Go code.

Core Design Philosophy: Zero Lock-in

• If you decide this project isn't suitable, you can simply delete all .mygo files and continue development with the original Go code
• If your team doesn't want to introduce mygo, you can edit .mygo files locally and commit the generated standard Go code to your version control server
• The precompiled Go code has no runtime dependencies or special libraries

Design Constraints

To achieve zero lock-in, there are some intentional limitations:

1. The ? operator does not support method chaining - For example, a()?.b()? is not supported because it would require introducing intermediate variables, and it's difficult to provide reasonable names for these variables
2. Currently does not support the ? operator in for loop initialization statements - For example, for item := range getItems()? is not yet supported. This limitation may be removed in the future
3. When discarding return values, functions must have only an error return - When you don't accept any return values from a function (i.e., when using f()?), the function must have exactly one return value of type error. If a function returns multiple values (e.g., func f() (int, error)), you need to use _ to discard the non-error return values: _ = f()?

These constraints ensure the generated Go code remains clean, readable, and identical to hand-written code.

TODO

• Implement a Go-compatible command-line tool that supports all Go flags and commands, with the only difference being that it preprocesses all .mygo files to .go files before running compile or test operations