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Comment by imsofuture | Hacker News Reader

This is how I felt when I started using go, but I was unable to rationalize why beyond 'it's different'.

What's the real difference between `cd ~/dev` and `cd $MYGO` (~/dev/go/src/github.com/myusername)?

The difference is the Go tooling is dictating your whole code layout that may not match your personal preference. I work in a multitude of languages and I organize my code in ~/code/work for work/contracting code bases, ~/code/personal for my code bases and ~/code/third-party for source code I want to look at and maybe contribute casually to. I have never figured out a good way to fit GOPATH into this without completely rearranging how I organize my code, which I have zero desire to do for one language, especially one that's not my main.

You can specify multiple GOPATHs which will be searched in order for packages;

Your GOPATH could be set to "~/libs/go:~/code/work for work/contracting/go:~code/personal:~/code/third-party"

which would put any go-get libaries into ~/libs/go and allow using packages from the other folders. Keep in mind that Go will still use these Gopaths like any other Gopath repository; create a src/pkg/bin folder set for use with the compiler

That's good to know, I had never come across that! Thanks.

Well imagine you use language foo, bar and go. Go insists all code lives in ~/go/src and foo insists it all lives in ~/foo/source. Neither likes symlinks, which one wins?

Also people like to keep other artefacts alongside source code like scripts, resources, templates, tools etc and often have an existing elaborate project structure in order to accommodate that. Go forces them to throw that out and use something under gopath. It's annoying and an unnecessary stumbling block for people starting out in Go.

Go doesn't insist that your code lives in ~/go/src. It can live anywhere beneath a directory of your choice. Note that there's no requirement that GOPATH contains only Go source code. You can put your scripts and resources, as well as other source code, right next to the Go sources.

So you just put your code into ~/src/project/a.go and ~/src/project/b.foo (assuming a GOPATH=$HOME).

Note src vs source in the original comment. Go forces you to change everything else to conform to gopath. I use go a lot and am used to it now but IMO that is a Bad Thing.

Put Go stuff in $GOPATH/src and Foo stuff in ~/foo/source. Problem solved. Go doesn't dictate where non-Go code lives...

This is the least of all problems.

So now your go stuff and foo stuff lives in different dirs based on which programming language it happens to use, not which project it is for. To you perhaps this is a non-problem, to others it appears to be and it is a recurring cause of grief for newcomers to go.

    export GOPATH="~/go:~/foo"

GOPATH will use ~/go as default for go get and importing and fall back to any further folders specified.

The difference is that I don't want all my Go programs in a different place. I have my place where I put projects. I have ~/projects, ~/oldprojects, ~/defunctprojects. I have ~/contribprojects for things that aren't mine. I decide where my files go.

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