The interactive environment is VERY helpful for a programmer. However, it seems Go does not provide it. Is my understanding correct?
No, Go does not provide a REPL.
However, as already mentioned, Go Playground (this is the new URL) is very handy. The Go Authors are also thinking about adding a feature-rich editor to it.
If you want something local, consider installing hsandbox. Running it simply with hsandbox go
will split your terminal screen (with screen
) where you can write code at the top and see its execution output at the bottom on every save.
There was a gotry
among standard Go commands, which used to evaluate expressions (with an optional package name), and could be run like gotry 1+2
and gotry fmt 'Println("hello")'
from shell. It is no longer available because not many people actually used it.
I have also seen third party projects for building a REPL for Go, but now I can only find links to two of them: igo and go-repl. How well do they work I don't know.
My two cents: Speed of compilation makes writing a REPL possible for Go, as it has also helped building the tools mentioned here, but the same speed makes REPL less necessary. Every time I want to test something in Go that I can't run in Playground I open a simple .go
file and start coding and simply run the code. This will be even easier when the go
command in Go 1 makes one-command build process possible and way easier.
UPDATE: Latest weekly release of Go added go
command which can be used to very easily build a file: write your prog.go
file and run go build prog.go && ./prog
UPDATE 2: With Go 1 you can directly run go programs with go run filename.go
UPDATE 3: gore
is a new project which seems interesting.