go-idol

In-progress reference implementation of Idol, a language- and platform-independent IDL and encoding for zero-copy serialization of structured data.

Building

The primary build system used for development of go-idol is Bazel. Version 7.x or greater is recommended.

# Build the `idol` command-line tool.
bazel build //bin/idol

# Build the `idol-wasm-go.wasm` codegen plugin
bazel build //bin/idol-codegen-go:idol-codegen-go_wasm

# Build the Go codegen plugin as a standalone binary
bazel build //bin/idol-codegen-go

# Run tests against the revision of https://github.com/jmillikin/idol
# depended on in `MODULE.bazel`.
bazel test //...

The idol command-line tool and idol-codegen-go standalone code generator binary can also be built with go build.

cd bin/idol
go build
cd ../idol-codegen-go
go build

Current status

The code in this repository is very rough, and is under active development. The original reference implementation of Idol was written in Rust, but had to be hurriedly re-written in Go to ensure long-term API stability.

Things that are expected to work:

• Parsing and compilation of most valid Idol schemas, using the idol compile command.

• Detection of most schema errors — note that some known-invalid schema conditions are not yet detected, such as recursive struct declarations.

• Go code generation for enum and message declarations, using the idol codegen command and the idol-codegen-go.wasm codegen plugin.

  • Enough to generate the schema_idl.go and codegen_idl.go files in this repository, but not much more.

• Running tests against the https://github.com/jmillikin/idol testdata/ directory.

• Encoding messages to the text encoding.

Things that don’t yet work:

• Go codegen of const, struct, and union declarations.

  • The support library is missing the code for these types.

• Validation of decoded message field content, such as checking that text fields contain valid UTF-8.

• Compilation of schemas with multiple levels of const alias-assignment.

• Compilation of schemas with the bytes type (alias of u8[])

• Encoding and decoding of messages containing handle fields.

• Parsing the text encoding.

• The idol format command.

Things that kind of work but not well:

• The top-level API in the Go support library was translated more-or-less directly from Rust, and many of the Rust idioms did not make the transition gracefully.

• The Go import paths are rooted at go.idol-lang.org, but that domain hasn’t yet been configured to host Go packages, so go install and other built-in Go tooling works poorly or not at all.