Summary

This is a library written in C for creating and marshalling gobs as implemented by the Go standard libraries. See golang.org for more info.

Purpose

This library can be used to push structured data from C programs into a Go process over a socket or pipe in a format that can be decoded by a gob decoder. That way, an out-of-process C program can create fully-instantiated objects inside a Go application.

Please note that this is a very low-level library, and knowledge of the gob wire protocol is necessary prior to use. Please see the description at http://golang.org/pkg/gob/

Getting started

To get started, download the source code, and run the unit tests:

make test
./test

Then create libgob.a with:

make

Encoding proceeds in three stages:

• Generate type ids: use gob_allocate_type_id()
• Marshal type definitions: use gob_start_type_definition() and others
• Marshal type values: use gob_encode_unsigned_int() and others

Generally all functions take a buffer and a buffer size as the first two arguments. The general method contract is that the function will write up to "buffer size" bytes in the provided buffer, and return the total number of bytes that would have been written had the buffer been big enough. Therefore a return value bigger than "buffer_size" indicates an error condition.

See the comments in encode.h for more information.

Sample code

Two examples of gob encoding can be found in encode_test.c, in functions test_gob_encode_simple_type() and test_gob_encode_more_complex_type().