Using C Dynamic Libraries In Go Programs

My son and I were having fun last weekend building a console based game in Go. I was recreating a game from my youth, back when I was programming on a Kaypro II.

I loved this computer. I would write games in BASIC on it all day and night. Did I mention it was portable. The keyboard would strap in and you could carry it around. LOL.

But I digress, back to my Go program. I figured out a way to use the VT100 escape character codes to draw out a simple screen and started programming some of the logic.

Then something horrible happened and I had a major flashback. I could not get input from stdin without hitting the enter key. Ahhhhh  I spent all weekend reading up on how to make this happen. I even found two Go libraries that had support for this but they didn't work. I realized that if I was going to make this happen I needed to build the functionality in C and link that to my Go program.

After a 4 hour coding session at the local Irish pub, I figured it out. I would like to thank Guinness for the inspiration and encouragement I needed. Understand that for the past 10 years I have been writing windows services in C#. For 10 years before that I was writing C/C++ but on the Microsoft stack. Everything I was reading: gcc, gco, static and shared libraries on the Mac and Linux, etc, was foreign to me. I had a lot to learn and still do.

After all my research it became clear I needed to use the ncurses dynamic library. I decided to write a simple program in C using the library. If I could make it work in a compiled C program, I was sure I could get it to work in Go.