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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

I use computers I can’t install a Go toolchain fairly often, either because I don’t have permission to do so or Go isn’t really supported for the platform.

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No need to compile it yourself, for most common platforms you can download static binaries: https://github.com/zyedidia/micro/releases/tag/v2.0.4

That list is sadly a bit short :(

I must admit that I did a double take since I'm so used to seeing projects that only release for Windows and OSX but not Linux, or some other combination of two out of those three, but I suppose that is me having too low expectation more than anything else.

You could open an issue asking for the platform you are missing- Go supposedly has good cross compilation support[0], so as long as Go supports it and you can help confirm that the builds work for the devs they might be open to it.

[0] https://dave.cheney.net/2015/08/22/cross-compilation-with-go...

Genuinely curious what’s missing.

I sometimes need to do work on niche and/or cursed platforms: iPhone, Linux 2.something for MIPS, a semi-functional Linux reimplementation, … Finding a Go toolchain for these is not easy, if it exists at all, but one for C with the right set of libraries (as far as I am aware, just ncurses?) if it didn't already ship with the OS or was available in some prebuilt form is not nearly as hard.

That list only refers to changes since the previous release.. not a complete feature list...

And go is not an interpreted language. You don't need go tools to run precompiled go binaries. Just like with C, you don't need gcc to run C binaries.

However, you seem determined to hate this for whatever reason.

I don't hate the software, I'm merely listing reasons why I don't think I could use this over nano; a list I think is relevant because the project seems to have an explicit goal of being competitive with it. I am well aware that Go is a compiled language, the issue I have is that its reach is less than C's. (FWIW, the "list" I was referring to was the list of precompiled binaries, not the feature list, which I pulled from the website copy.)

If you're missing a particular platform and it's even remotely popular, open an issue. Ideally if you can open a PR for it too that'd be great, but those kinds of requests are usually easy to satisfy but won't be done until there's demand for them.

> If you're missing a particular platform and it's even remotely popular

I think this is the problem ;) My complaints center around platforms which aren't popular enough to merit someone actually maintaining a port for.

I usually build from source for three different platforms (phone, regular pc, arm) on my main computer, and carry around the binaries with my dotfiles. Building from source consists of a single go get command, so it's not too bad. And I've yet to hit a single compatability issue with thos ebinaries, knock on wood.

Depending on which specific platforms those are, you might be able to get away with a precompiled binary from their GitHub page?

I get nagging comments otherwise about security, as if we are all reading every line of source when we compile something.

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