ginger/go-interop.md

Go interop

Ginger translates down to go code, and many of its conventions and rules follow from go's conventions and rules. In most cases these decisions were made to help with interoperability with existing go code.

Referencing go package variables/functions

See the package doc for more on this

Types

Go types and ginger types share a lot of overlap:

• Ginger strings are of go's string type

• Ginger integers are of go's int type

• Ginger floats are of go's float32 type

• Ginger characters are of go's rune type

• Ginger errors are of go's error type

Casting

Each go type has a corresponding ginger casting function:

(: int64 5)
(: float64 5.5)
(: rune 'a')

go-drop

the go-drop form can be used for furthur interoperability. The rationale behind go-drop is that there are simply too many cases to be able to create enough individual functions, or a few generic functions, that would cover all cases. Instead we use a single function, go-drop, which lets us drop down into go code and interact with it directly. There are a number of pre-made functions which implement commonly needed behaviors, such as StringSlice and ByteSlice, which cast from either go or ginger types into []string and []byte, respectively.

(. go-drop
    "func StringSlice(v ginger.Elem) []string {
        ret := []string{}
        // do some stuff
        return ret
    }")