ppai-plivo / go-mime-lib-compare

Comparison of Go MIME type detection libraries

go-mime-lib-compare

A simple project to compare different Go projects/packages that detect MIME types.

Libraries

Library	Implementation	Stars	Contributors
http.DetectContentType	Pure Go
gabriel-vasile/mimetype	Pure Go
zRedShift/mimemagic	Pure Go
h2non/filetype	Pure Go
vimeo/go-magic/magic	libmagic
rakyll/magicmime	libmagic

Building

Dependency:

Some go packages for MIME type detection are libmagic wrappers.

$ brew install libmagic

Build:

$ go build

Use:

$ ./go-mime-lib-compare > out.md

See comparison results.

Summary

• gabriel-vasile/mimetype is written in pure Go and has good detection capablities and uses a hierarchical detection structure.
• Go wrappers of libmagic have the most accurate MIME type detection. However it entails use of cgo. Further, libmagic is not threadsafe and hence Go wrappers will have to use either sync.Mutex or runtime.LockOSThread.
• Although h2non/filetype is written in pure Go, it doesn't detect a variety of types. Further, surprisingly, its detection is not deterministic. IOW, for the same input file, MIME type detected can be different on each run! This is not recommended for any production use.