Hacker News Reader

Comment by golangnews | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com