mgo release r2014.07.21, now at gopkg.in

Posted on 2014/07/21 by niemeyer

This is a special release of mgo, the Go driver for MongoDB. Besides the several new features, this release marks the change of the Go package import path to gopkg.in, after years using the current one based on a static file that lives at labix.org. Note that the package API is still not changing in any backwards incompatible way, though, so it is safe to replace in-use import paths right away. Instead, the change is being done for a few other reasons:

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Go QML Contest results

Posted on 2014/04/25 by niemeyer

Yesterday at GopherCon I had the chance to sit together with Dave Cheney and Jamu Kakar to judge the entries received for the Go QML Contest. The result was already announced today, live at the second day of GopherCon, including a short demo on stage of the three most relevant entries received. This blog post provides more details for the winner and also for a few of these additional entries.

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Arbitrary Qt extensions with Go QML

Posted on 2014/03/21 by niemeyer

As part of the on going work on Ubuntu Touch phones, I was invited to contribute a Go package to interface with ubuntuoneauth, a C++ and Qt library that authenticates against Ubuntu One using the system account made available by the phone owner. The details of that library and its use case are not interesting for most people right now, but the work to interface with it is a good example to talk about because, besides the result (uoneauth) being an external and independent Go package that extends the qml package, ubuntuoneauth is not a QML library, but rather a plain Qt library. Some of the callbacks use even traditional C++ types that do not inherit from QObject and have no Qt metadata, so offering that functionality from Go nicely takes a bit more work.

What follows are some of the highlights of that integration logic, to serve as a reference for similar extensions in the future. Note that if your interest is in creating QML applications with Go, none of this is necessary and the documentation is a better place to start.

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Go QML Contest

Posted on 2014/03/13 by niemeyer

UPDATE: The contest result is out.

A couple of weeks ago a probe message was sent to a few places questioning whether there would be enough interest on a development contest involving Go QML applications. Since the result was quite positive, we’re moving the idea forward!

OpenGL Gopher

This blog post provides further information on how to participate. If you have any other questions not covered here, or want technical help with your application, please get in touch via the mailing list or twitter.

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Posted in Conference, Go, Project | 2 Comments

Taking the Gopher for a spin

Posted on 2014/02/18 by niemeyer

As originally shared on Google+, and as a follow up of the previous post covering OpenGL on Go QML, a new screencast was published to demonstrate the latest features introduced around OpenGL support in Go QML:

Refrences:

Posted in Architecture, Design, Go, Math, Project | 3 Comments

QML components with Go and OpenGL

Posted on 2013/12/23 by niemeyer

As recently announced, my latest endeavor at Canonical is to enable graphical client-side development with the Go language via a new qml Go package that integrates the language with Qt’s QML framework.

The QML framework solves the problem of designing graphic applications via a language that offers a convenient mix of declarative and procedural features. As a very simple example, if the following QML content is loaded by itself, it will draw a square centralized inside a window:

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mgo r2013.09.04 released

Posted on 2013/09/05 by niemeyer

Another release of the mgo Go driver for MongoDB hits the repository.

Here is the selection of fixes and improvements:

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An AVR assembly test suite

Posted on 2013/08/31 by niemeyer

About a year ago I ordered a pack of 10 atmega328p processors from China to play with. They took a while to get here, and it took even longer for me to get back to them, but a few days ago the motivation to start doing something finally appeared.

I’ve never actually played with AVRs before, and felt a bit like I was jumping a step in my electronics enthusiast progress by not diving into its architecture a bit more deeply. Also, despite the obvious advantages of ARM-based chips these days, the platform is still interesting in some perspectives, such as its widespread availability, low price in small quantities, and the ability to plug them in a breadboard and do things without pretty much any circuitry.

To get acquainted with the architecture and to depart from things I work on more frequently, the project is so far taking the shape of an assembly library of functionality relevant for developing small projects, built mainly around binutils for the AVR. I did end up cheating a bit and compiling the assembly code via avr-gcc, just to get the __do_copy_data initialization routine injected, so that I don’t have to pull up the .data section from program memory into RAM manually.

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Twik: a tiny language for Go

Posted on 2013/07/16 by niemeyer

As part of one of the projects we’ve been pushing at Canonical, I spent a few days researching about the possibility of extending a compiled Go application with a tiny language that would allow expressing simple procedural logic in a controlled environment. Although we’re not yet sure of the direction we’ll take, the result of this short experiment is being released as the twik language for open fiddling.

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Posted in Architecture, Design, Go, Project, Snippet | 3 Comments

House decoration by Epson

Posted on 2013/07/09 by niemeyer

I bought an Epson multi-functional printer last weekend, and now I have a big and expensive furniture for the house.

This is what one gets into when buying an Epson printer:

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