February 2026 Go Meetup

Meetup #82 on February 18 in person at Edmonton Unlimited at 6:00 pm.

Please RSVP at Meetup

News

• golangweekly.com latest

Agenda

Using Go for Scripts

Abram Hindle walked through using Go as a scripting language, framed as "goals, failures, and working shebang patterns." The goal was single .go files in ~/bin, run like scripts via /usr/bin/env, with compiled binaries cached to avoid paying the full go run cost on every invocation. He quoted Rob Pike's position that a built-in script runner isn't worth the compiler/linker I/O it would encourage, then tried go-run-cache/gobin (which want a module context, breaking standalone scripts) before settling on gx, a runner that hashes a script, compiles once, and reuses the binary. A classic #! line fails outright because Go rejects #, and /usr/bin/env gx run treats "gx run" as a single program name unless -S splits it. The working solution is a comment-shebang — //usr/bin/env -S gx run "$0" "$@"; exit "$?" — which is valid Go (a comment) and also valid shell, giving a single-file, cached Go script.

Key points:

• Goal: single-file .go scripts that run like shell scripts, with caching.
• Rob Pike argues a built-in Go script runner isn't worth the resource cost.
• go-run-cache/gobin need a module context, breaking standalone scripts.
• A real #! line fails because Go rejects # as an illegal character.
• /usr/bin/env gx run treats "gx run" as one program; -S fixes argument splitting.
• The comment-shebang //usr/bin/env -S gx run "$0" "$@" is valid Go and shell.
• gx hashes the script, compiles once, and reuses the cached binary.

presentation

Future Topics Discussion

Open discussion on topic for future talks, workshops, activities.

Events

• Edmonton Go Meetup March