[Feature Proposal] Go Support for Building Native Extensions

[sue445]

I want bundle gem --ext=go in bundler. (like Rust)

Pros

Go has some excellent features that other languages do not have, such as goroutine and Channels.

I believe these would be more convenient if these features were available from Ruby.

Below is a benchmark comparing Ractor and goroutine.

In my benchmark, goroutine is about x26-28 faster than Ractor 💨

$ ruby tarai.rb
go version go1.23.2 darwin/arm64
ruby 3.3.5 (2024-09-03 revision ef084cc8f4) [arm64-darwin23]
Warming up --------------------------------------
          sequential     1.000 i/100ms
   parallel (Ractor)     1.000 i/100ms
parallel (goroutine)     1.000 i/100ms
Calculating -------------------------------------
          sequential      0.019 (± 0.0%) i/s    (51.42 s/i) -      1.000 in  51.417686s
   parallel (Ractor)      0.059 (± 0.0%) i/s    (17.02 s/i) -      1.000 in  17.022087s
parallel (goroutine)      1.677 (± 0.0%) i/s  (596.20 ms/i) -      9.000 in   5.365863s

Comparison:
parallel (goroutine):        1.7 i/s
   parallel (Ractor):        0.1 i/s - 28.55x  slower
          sequential:        0.0 i/s - 86.24x  slower

Details

Original idea is @mmasaki 's https://rubykaigi.org/2015/presentations/mmasaki/

At the time of his talk (2015), Go did not have a standard package manager.
So I think he had to create his own binding to call CRuby functions from Go.

However, there is now a standard package manager called Go module.

I auto-generated (almost) all of Go's bindings automatically from ruby.h. (about 1,100 functions)

https://github.com/sue445/go-gem-wrapper/blob/v0.1.0/ruby/function_generated.go

What features are needed in the bundler

I made this little script to make the skeleton into a Go gem right after doing bundle gem --ext=c.

https://github.com/sue445/go-gem-wrapper/tree/main/_tools/patch_for_go_gem

However, I believe that if bundler itself had equivalent functionality like Rust, many people would be able to use this.

I would like to port what we are doing in patch_for_go_gem.rb to bundler if I can get the approval of others.

Other idea

Adding functionality to the bundler core every time we add more supported languages to the bundle gem also seems like a high barrier.

And I think it's hard for bundler maintainers to keep maintaining many language templates...

Therefore, it might be useful to add a plugin mechanism to the bundle gem so that everyone can write native extension in their favorite language more casually.

e.g. bundle gem my_gem --template=bundler-gem-go

bundler has a plugin mechanism.
https://bundler.io/guides/bundler_plugins.html

But it does not seem to extend bundle gem.

What do you all think?

[hsbt]

I'm +1 for this. Can you submit a PR for this like go_builder.rb under https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/tree/master/lib/rubygems/ext?

[sue445]

@hsbt ok. I'll make a patch.

[sue445]

I created #8183