Language Driver Request for Golang

[farost]

Golang (or just Go) is a popular language and many Go developers could benefit from using TypeDB driver in their code. Considering the already existing instruments we usually want to see for a target language for our drivers, it seems to be a good aim for us.

SWIG to use our native C functions: check (pay attention to the memory management and how it wraps arrays, some typemaps could be found from the official repo).

Bazel rules: check.

Cucumber lib for BDD: check(official!).

[farost]

The basic checklist, it could be updated with new details in the future:

Base questions:

• Define Go version (check what versions are the most popular and still supported by the devs now, are they backwards-compatible, what version of Go to use for the driver to cover the most part of the Go community)

Initial Bazel setup:

• Connect Bazel: build and run a sample "Hello, world!" application in Go using Bazel
• Split the "Hello, world" app into a lib and a binary using Bazel, connect them together
• Define the differences between embedding libs into binaries and adding them as dependencies
• Add an automatic test using the go_test rule
• Gazelle - what is it for? Do we need to use it?
• Define how to specify Go version for libs/binaries
• Test if an application of an older Go version can add a package developed on a newer Go version

Initial BDD setup:

• Add BDD (the Cucumber lib mentioned in the description) library to the Bazel build
• Test adding external libraries to the project (the Cucumber lib)
• build and run a sample BDD test using Bazel

Initial SWIG setup:

• Try SWIG: generate Go-wrappers using swig and the C driver headers manually, explore the content of it

Connection implementation step:

• Connect SWIG generation with Bazel: write additional rules to get the native library for Go, and test it by adding a TypeDB native call into the "Hello, world!" app
• Implement Connection for the driver: database manager, session + transaction manipulations
• Implement Connection BDD tests to cover the previously written code

Implementation finish:

• Implement the remainder of the driver and BDD tests
• Implement integration tests for code samples (check C# examples)
• Define the distribution process
• Implement CI/CD
• Implement documentation generation
• Release

[nickan2c]

Choice of Go Version is 1.21 (Go releases)

• This is the lowest, currently supported release of Go, and it supports a large number of packages. Go only supports the two most recently released packages, and releases happen every 6 months.
• Go supports backwards compatibility entirely until this release, and it breaks it slightly in release 1.22, so this will support our users and should cover most of the Go community.

[farost]

Publishing: https://go.dev/doc/modules/developing