Go

Go is a statically-typed language with syntax loosely derived from that of C, adding garbage collected memory management, type safety, some dynamic-typing capabilities, additional built-in types such as variable-length arrays and key-value maps, and a large standard library.

Using cgo on NixOS

On NixOS, include files and libraries aren't kept in a system-wide search path. If a Go program uses cgo and attempts to include C header files, or link against libraries, compilation is likely to fail.

In order to expose header files and libraries in environment variable search paths, nix-shell can be used to enter an environment which provides the requested development dependencies.

For example, suppose a Go program includes <sys/capability.h> (provided by libcap), and links against libcap. To obtain an environment in which the program can be compiled, run:

$ nix-shell -p libcap go gcc

You can verify the presence of the necessary environment variables via the following command:

$ export | egrep 'NIX_.*(LDFLAGS|COMPILE|LINK)'

If you intend to compile against glibc statically (such as via go build -ldflags "-s -w -linkmode external -extldflags -static"), add glibc.static to the list of packages passed to nix-shell.

Compile go program with static compile flag

If go build -ldflags "-s -w -linkmode external -extldflags -static" fails on NixOS, with the error message cannot find `-lpthread and cannot find -lc - it is because the linker cannot find static glibc to link with. You need to have glibc.static in your environment (and have CFLAGS/LDFLAGS adjusted accordingly). One way to achieve this is to have something like the following as `shell.nix` and run the compilation in a nix-shell:

with import <nixpkgs> {}; {
  devEnv = stdenv.mkDerivation {
    name = "dev";
    buildInputs = [ stdenv git go glibc.static ];
    CFLAGS="-I${pkgs.glibc.dev}/include";
    LDFLAGS="-L${pkgs.glibc}/lib";
  };
}