Yaegi is Another Elegant Go Interpreter. It powers executable Go scripts and plugins, in embedded interpreters or interactive shells, on top of the Go runtime.
Features
- Complete support of Go specification
- Written in pure Go, using only the standard library
- Simple interpreter API:
New()
,Eval()
,Use()
- Works everywhere Go works
- All Go & runtime resources accessible from script (with control)
- Security:
unsafe
andsyscall
packages neither used nor exported by default - Support Go 1.13 and Go 1.14 (the latest 2 major releases)
Install
Go package
import "github.com/containous/yaegi/interp"
Command-line executable
go get -u github.com/containous/yaegi/cmd/yaegi
Note that you can use rlwrap (install with your favorite package manager),
and alias the yaegi
command in alias yaegi='rlwrap yaegi'
in your ~/.bashrc
, to have history and command line edition.
Usage
As an embedded interpreter
Create an interpreter with New()
, run Go code with Eval()
:
package main
import (
"github.com/containous/yaegi/interp"
"github.com/containous/yaegi/stdlib"
)
func main() {
i := interp.New(interp.Options{})
i.Use(stdlib.Symbols)
_, err := i.Eval(`import "fmt"`)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
_, err = i.Eval(`fmt.Println("Hello Yaegi")`)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
}
As a dynamic extension framework
The following program is compiled ahead of time, except bar()
which is interpreted, with the following steps:
- use of
i.Eval(src)
to evaluate the script in the context of interpreter - use of
v, err := i.Eval("foo.Bar")
to get the symbol from the interpreter context, as areflect.Value
- application of
Interface()
method and type assertion to convertv
intobar
, as if it was compiled
package main
import "github.com/containous/yaegi/interp"
const src = `package foo
func Bar(s string) string { return s + "-Foo" }`
func main() {
i := interp.New(interp.Options{})
_, err := i.Eval(src)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
v, err := i.Eval("foo.Bar")
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
bar := v.Interface().(func(string) string)
r := bar("Kung")
println(r)
}
As a command-line interpreter
The Yaegi command can run an interactive Read-Eval-Print-Loop:
$ yaegi
> 1 + 2
3
> import "fmt"
> fmt.Println("Hello World")
Hello World
>
Or interpret Go files:
$ yaegi cmd/yaegi/yaegi.go
>
Or for Go scripting in the shebang line:
$ cat /tmp/test
#!/usr/bin/env yaegi
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Println("test")
}
$ ls -la /tmp/test
-rwxr-xr-x 1 dow184 dow184 93 Jan 6 13:38 /tmp/test
$ /tmp/test
test
Documentation
Documentation about Yaegi commands and libraries can be found at usual godoc.org.
Limitations
Beside the known bugs which are supposed to be fixed in the short term, there are some limitations not planned to be addressed soon:
- assembly files (
.s
) are not supported - calling C code is not supported (no virtual "C" package)
- interfaces to be used from the pre-compiled code can not be added dynamically, as it is required to pre-compile interface wrappers
- representation of types by
reflect
and printing values using %T may give different results between compiled mode and interpreted mode - interpreting computation intensive code is likely to remain significantly slower than in compiled mode