bediger4000 / kilo-in-go

Kilo text editor, from Build Your Own Text Editor, in Go

kilo text editor in Golang

I did Build Your Own Text Editor only in Go instead of C. I tried to keep the spirit of kilo: a single file of source code, everything as simple as possible.

I tried to check in after completing each step, but sometimes I combined a few steps, or fixed bugs between steps.

Compare C and Go

I have some experience with C, but I'm learning Go. I'd like to use this project to compare the two languages, as well as to internalize Go.

I found the two languages comparable in terms of expressiveness. I transliterated the C code almost directly into Go. There was little difference in line count in the end:

Language  Files  Code    Comment  Blank  Total
    Go      1     797      163     86     1044
     C      1     757      152    161     1068

That's according to sloc

Where I found Go Better

Go's range operator made most iterations much simpler.

Go's standard packages had a type bytes.Buffer that replaced struct ab in the C version.

Go's built-in string type was a wash for me: C kilo assumes 1-byte characters, and since I was just transliterating, I did the same in Go. I ended up using []byte types for a great deal of the code that dealt with ASCII-Nul-terminated-strings. It might be fun to convert to Go string and []rune and see how that works out.

Go's memory management was a net positive. Not having to realloc() all the time was easier.

Slices seem to work well, if you think of them as typed pointers-to-arrays.

The "useful zero value" for new variables means a lot less initialization happens than in C, with a lot less room for error.

Where I found Go Worse

C's looser idea of what comprises true and false in looping and conditional tests lets C Kilo do some interesting things that required extra bool variables in Go.

Go's Linux system call support seemed a lot less well documented, but kilo does do a lot of semi-undocumented things to begin with. Getting and setting terminal attributes, and getting into and out of raw mode always seems a bit sketchy.

C's preprocessor macros actually would made a little clearer code in the Go func editorPrompt(): I found it harder to express "control H" in Go.

C enums worked better than Go const. This is a bit disingenous, since a more idiomatic Go text editor would have several small packages. Per-package types and constants would overcome this objection.