Platform Specific Go

You can compile platform specific go code by putting it in specially named files. If your component is called foo.go then putting something in foo_darwin.go will only compile that on Mac and foo_linux will do it on linux distros accordingly.

I recently encountered this while reading through Shopify’s sysv_mq implementation. This library is a wrapper around native syscalls via cgo.

The ipcStat() method in wrapper.go pulls out all the queue metadata from the native struct

// wrapper.go
stat := &QueueStats{
	Perm:  perm,
	Stime: int64(info.msg_stime),
	// Rtime:  int64(info.msg_rtime), // https://github.com/Shopify/sysv_mq/issues/10
	Ctime:  int64(info.msg_ctime),
	Cbytes: cbytesFromStruct(info),
	Qnum:   uint64(info.msg_qnum),
	Qbytes: uint64(info.msg_qbytes),
	Lspid:  int32(info.msg_lspid),
	Lrpid:  int32(info.msg_lrpid),
}

But it turns out that the Cbytes value is not in the same field across platforms, so instead of putting the fetching logic inline it is moved into a method cbytesFromStruct().

On Mac the value is fetched from msg_cbytes

// wrapper_darwin.go
func cbytesFromStruct(info *_Ctype_struct___msqid_ds_new) uint64 {
	return uint64(info.msg_cbytes)
}

whereas on linux it is available in __msg_cbytes

// wrapper_linux.go
func cbytesFromStruct(info *_Ctype_struct_msqid_ds) uint64 {
	return uint64(info.__msg_cbytes)
}

Now go build will only compile the specific version of cbytesFromStruct() based on the target platform. One thing to note here is that if you are building static binaries from your Mac to run on a *nix machine or container you’ll probably want to build it inside a container to force the correct version.