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Pretty much every language has a GOPATH thing. CLASSPATH, PYTHON_PATH, PERL5LIB, ... I never really understand the hate here. It seems more like they didn't h

by zaphar 8y ago

Pretty much every language has a GOPATH thing. CLASSPATH, PYTHON_PATH, PERL5LIB, ... I never really understand the hate here. It seems more like they didn't hate GOPATH specifically and more that they didn't like not having a package manager.

pjmlp 8y ago
The ones listed by you apply mostly as library search path, while go compilers required GOPATH to point to the project being compiled.
- kjksf 8y ago
  False. You can put your code anywhere you want and `go build` and `go run` will work just fine. It's only third party libraries that have to be in GOPATH, which is exactly a library (well, package) search path.
  - aeijdenberg 8y ago
    False only for very small values of code. ie if your code itself is split into modules, they won't work (as they are imported by their full path, not relatively), and anything in your vendor dir is also ignored when used outside of a GOPATH entry.
dagss 8y ago
GOPATH behaves very, very differently from PYTHON_PATH and CLASSPATH, it is not the same thing at all. Basically before go 1.11, it was impossible to just do git clone ... somedir cd somedir # build code and run something You had to instead make sure "somedir" ended up somewhere within a particular deep directory structure. That is what people mean when they say "GOPATH".
- Merovius 8y ago
  > Basically before go 1.11, it was impossible to just do That's not true. It was always perfectly possible to do that, the code you build just couldn't import any libraries not installed in GOPATH. AIUI that is exactly the same as in other languages.
  - dagss 8y ago
    Our git repo for a backend service contains dozens of packages, and many small packages is recommended in go, and they do need to import one another... I guess it is not all that different from Python, with Python you need to add the source path to PYTHONPATH / sys.path (and often do so at runtime in the entrypoint script). With go you need the "src/github.com/dagss" prefix to the path. Or at least, according to conventions. You are right that it is more similar on a technical level than what I thought.
mkozlows 8y ago
Java, Perl, and Python all date back to the '90s. Yeah, that was a commmon pattern in the '90s.

by zaphar 8y ago

pjmlp 8y ago

The ones listed by you apply mostly as library search path, while go compilers required GOPATH to point to the project being compiled.

kjksf 8y ago
False. You can put your code anywhere you want and `go build` and `go run` will work just fine. It's only third party libraries that have to be in GOPATH, which is exactly a library (well, package) search path.
- aeijdenberg 8y ago
  False only for very small values of code. ie if your code itself is split into modules, they won't work (as they are imported by their full path, not relatively), and anything in your vendor dir is also ignored when used outside of a GOPATH entry.

dagss 8y ago

GOPATH behaves very, very differently from PYTHON_PATH and CLASSPATH, it is not the same thing at all. Basically before go 1.11, it was impossible to just do git clone ... somedir cd somedir # build code and run something You had to instead make sure "somedir" ended up somewhere within a particular deep directory structure. That is what people mean when they say "GOPATH".

Merovius 8y ago
> Basically before go 1.11, it was impossible to just do That's not true. It was always perfectly possible to do that, the code you build just couldn't import any libraries not installed in GOPATH. AIUI that is exactly the same as in other languages.
- dagss 8y ago
  Our git repo for a backend service contains dozens of packages, and many small packages is recommended in go, and they do need to import one another... I guess it is not all that different from Python, with Python you need to add the source path to PYTHONPATH / sys.path (and often do so at runtime in the entrypoint script). With go you need the "src/github.com/dagss" prefix to the path. Or at least, according to conventions. You are right that it is more similar on a technical level than what I thought.

mkozlows 8y ago

Java, Perl, and Python all date back to the '90s. Yeah, that was a commmon pattern in the '90s.