Feature Request: Go SDK for reading Lance datasets

[hiltonhe]

Problem

Lance currently has Rust, Python, and Java SDKs, but no Go SDK. Go-based data infrastructure projects (filesystems, object storage gateways, data pipelines) that need to interact with Lance datasets have no official way to do so.

Concrete Example: JuiceFS

JuiceFS (10K+ stars) is integrating Lance dataset warmup support. The implementation needs to:

1. Parse Lance manifests to discover data files
2. Read V2 file footers and CMO tables for column-level metadata
3. Map byte ranges to object storage slices for targeted cache warming

Without a Go SDK, we had to manually copy proto files, generate Go code, and write ~800 lines of format parsing logic — duplicating work that already exists in the Rust and Python SDKs.

Thanks

[yanghua]

You can consider this repo: https://github.com/lancedb/lancedb-go

[hiltonhe]

@yanghua hi, thank for answer.

I checked it but it's a LanceDB database SDK (CGO + native libs), it doesn't expose the low-level format APIs we need (manifest parsing,
footer reading, CMO table)