parisba / shenzhen-go

Experimental visual Go environment

"SHENZHEN GO" (working title)

SHENZHEN GO (working title) is an experimental visual Go environment, inspired by programming puzzle games such as TIS-100 and SHENZHEN I/O.

SHENZHEN GO provides a UI for editing a "graph," where the nodes are goroutines and the arrows are channel reads and writes. (This is analogous to multiple "microcontrollers" communicating electrically in a circuit.) It can also convert a graph into pure Go source code, which can be compiled and run, or used as a library in a regular Go program.

Dependencies

SHENZHEN GO requires:

• Go
• Graphviz
• A web browser (e.g. Chrome).

Installation

This assumes you have set your $GOPATH (common choices are $HOME and $HOME/go, but it's up to you).∂

To install, open a terminal and run:

go get -u github.com/google/shenzhen-go/cmd/shenzhen-go

This should create the shenzhen-go binary in your $GOPATH/bin directory. Run it:

$GOPATH/bin/shenzhen-go

and a web browser should appear with SHENZHEN GO (if not, navigate to http://localhost:8088/ manually).

The file browser is limited to the directory shenzhen-go was started in.

Navigate to the examples/primes.szgo file and play around - this demonstrates an example prime number sieve program.

Notes

This is not an official Google product.

This is an experimental project - expect plenty of rough edges and bugs, and no support.

More notes

• SHENZHEN GO is a strictly one-way process. You cannot import Go code that you wrote into SHENZHEN GO.
• You can write snippets of Go in your SHENZHEN GO graph, which then appear in the Go output.
• One day it should be possible to write zero Go code, yet produce wonderful graphs that do useful things.
• You can always save a copy of your program as Go, continue working on that, and never touch SHENZHEN GO again. I won't even judge you.
• However, modifications to the generated output won't be preserved if SHENZHEN GO builds or runs the design again.
• Don't treat the Go output as a virtuous paragon of how to code in Go. It is "machine-generated" and therefore held to a lower standard than "hand-made".
• The JSON-based file format aims to be diffable, or at least not ugly, for the benefit of source control and code review.