dwbuiten

Problems & Solutions for Interaction Between C and Go

At Vimeo, on the transcoding team, we work a lot with Go, and a lot with C, for various tasks such as media ingest. This means we use CGO quite extensively, and consequently, have run into bits that are perhaps not very well documented, if at all. Below is my effort to document some of the problems we've run into, and how we fixed or worked around them.

Many of these are obviously wrong in retrospect, but hindsight is 20/20, and these problems do exist in many codebases currently.

Some are definitely ugly, and I much welcome better solutions! Tweet me at @daemon404 if you have any, or have your own CGO story/tips, please! I'd love to learn of them.

Table of Contents

amlweems

/*
 * Qualys test program to check for presence of GHOST vulnerability
 * For more info: http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2015/01/27/9
 */
#include <netdb.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <errno.h>

dwbuiten

/*
 * posix_memalign wrapper with random failurres
 *
 * Copyright (c) 2013, Derek Buitenhuis
 *
 * Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any
 * purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
 * copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
 *
 * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES