In past posts in this series, I looked at how to convert a Go library in order for it to work in the browser. We used both the standard go compiler and TinyGo to compile Go code to WebAssembly, and we used GopherJS to compile Go code to JavaScript. If you did not read that post, I very much advice you to do so now; this post builds on that one, and readers are assumed to know the information in that post
In this post I will describe how to compile a Go library for use in the browser. It assumed that you’re familiar with the previous post in this series, as well have at least a basic understanding of Go, JavaScript and TypeScript.
I’m going to expose fzf-lib, so that we can make calls to it from JavaScript. fzf-lib is a library-port I made earlier from Junegunn Choi’s amazing command line program fzf.
The following items are discussed in this post:
Last month I posted a story about creating a stand-alone library from Junegunn Choi’s fzf. This was the first step in an effort to produce a version of fzf that runs in the browser. A second step would be to compile fzf-lib to run in the browser. Doing exactly that will be the content of a next post (after which there will be a couple more, looking at performance, looking at whether it’s the smart thing to do, packaging the whole thing into an npm package). In today’s post I will focus on how to make an interface between Go and JavaScript code. There is some documentation out there, but it’s few are far between (and some outdated); hopefully the explanations and examples here will help others (among which future me).
Over the past coupe of weeks I converted fzf into a go library, to be used in other projects.
See fzf-lib on Github Introduction Ever since I discovered Junegunn Choi’s fzf I’ve been a huge fan. It has all the properties of a great product: extremely low learning curve, intuitive usage (just start typing, and pick your result), intuitive result order (the thing that you most likely wanted is on top), and extremely fast, even when searching through millions of lines of text. Plus, once you get the hang of things, it does have the power to use smartly chosen meta-characters that make your search so much easier. It does all this through a highly configurable terminal interface, with helpful previews, and a vim plugin. I think I use fzf hundreds of times a day, both during work and free time!