The objective of this project is to enable the same Go code to be re-deployed in as many different execution environments as possible, thus saving development time and effort. The long-term vision is to provide a framework that makes it easy to target many languages as part of this project.
The first language targeted is Haxe, because the Haxe compiler generates 7 other languages and is already well-proven for making multi-platform client-side applications, mostly games.
Planned current use cases:
- For the Go community: write a library in Go and call it from existing Haxe, JavaScript, ActionScript, Java, C++, C# or PHP applications.
- For the Haxe community: provide access to the portable elements of Go's extensive libraries and open-source code base.
- Write a multi-platform client-side application in a mixture of Go and Haxe, using OpenFL / Lime or [Kha] (http://kha.ktxsoftware.com/) to target a sub-set of: Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Tizen, Emscripten, HTML5, webOS, Flash, Xbox and PlayStation.
For more background and on-line examples see the links from: http://tardisgo.github.io/
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - Donald Knuth
All of the core [Go language specification] (http://golang.org/ref/spec) is implemented, including single-threaded goroutines and channels. However the packages "unsafe" and "reflect", which are mentioned in the core specification, are not currently supported.
Some parts of the Go standard library work, as you can see in the example TARDIS Go code, but the bulk has not been tested or implemented yet. If in doubt, assume the standard package does not work. So fmt.Println("Hello world!") will not transpile, instead use the go builtin function: println("Hello world!").
A start has been made on the automated integration with Haxe libraries, but this is currently incomplete see: https://github.com/tardisgo/gohaxelib
The code requires Go 1.2 and Haxe 3.0.1. The only development platforms tested are OSX 10.9.1, Ubuntu 13.10 32-bit, Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit and Windows 7 32-bit.
Development priorities:
- For all Go standard libraries, report testing and implementation status
- Improve integration with Haxe code and libraries, automating as far as possible
- Improve currently poor execution speeds and update benchmarking results
- Research and publish the best methods to use TARDIS Go to create multi-platform client-side applications
- Improve debug and profiling capabilities
- Add command line flags to control options
- Publish more explanation and documentation
- Move more of the runtime into Go (rather than Haxe) to make it more portable
- Implement other target languages
TARDIS Go can be installed very easily:
go get -u github.com/tardisgo/tardisgo
(The -u is important to make sure you have the latest version of the go.tools repository. If tardisgo is not installing and there is a green "build:passing" icon at the top of this page, please e-mail the author!)
From the directory containing your .go files, first create a "tardis" sub-directory (examples in the sample code should already have one):
mkdir tardis
Then to translate Go to Haxe, from the directory containing your .go files type the command line:
tardisgo yourfilename.go
A single Go.hx file will be created in the tardis subdirectory.
To run your transpiled code you will first need to install Haxe.
Then to run the tardis/Go.hx file generated above, type the command line:
haxe -main tardis.Go --interp
... or whatever Haxe compilation options you want to use. See the tgoall.sh script for simple examples.
PHP specific issues:
- to compile for PHP you currently need to add the haxe compilation option "--php-prefix tgo" to avoid name conflicts
- very long PHP class/file names may cause name resolution problems on some platforms
Please go to http://github.com/tardisgo/tardisgo-samples for example Go code modified to work with tardisgo.
For public help or discussion please go to the Google Group; or feel free to e-mail Elliott direct to discuss any issues if you prefer.
The documentation is sparse at present, if there is some aspect of the system that you want to know more about, please let Elliott know and he will prioritise that area.
If you transpile your own code using TARDIS Go, please report the bugs that you find here, so that they can be fixed.
If you would like to get involved in helping the project to advance, that would be wonderful. However, please contact Elliott or discuss your plans in the tardisgo forum before writing any substantial amounts of code to avoid any conflicts.
MIT license, please see the license file.