Can I list all standard Go packages?

Question

Is there a way in Go to list all the standard/built-in packages (i.e., the packages which come installed with a Go installation)?

I have a list of packages and I want to figure out which packages are standard.

Answer 1

You can use the new golang.org/x/tools/go/packages for this. This provides a programmatic interface for most of go list:

package main

import (
    "fmt"

    "golang.org/x/tools/go/packages"
)

func main() {
    pkgs, err := packages.Load(nil, "std")
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }

    fmt.Println(pkgs)
    // Output: [archive/tar archive/zip bufio bytes compress/bzip2 ... ]
}

To get a isStandardPackage() you can store it in a map, like so:

package main

import (
    "fmt"

    "golang.org/x/tools/go/packages"
)

var standardPackages = make(map[string]struct{})

func init() {
    pkgs, err := packages.Load(nil, "std")
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }

    for _, p := range pkgs {
        standardPackages[p.PkgPath] = struct{}{}
    }
}

func isStandardPackage(pkg string) bool {
    _, ok := standardPackages[pkg]
    return ok
}

func main() {
    fmt.Println(isStandardPackage("fmt"))  // true
    fmt.Println(isStandardPackage("nope")) // false
}