Summary

I modified Rocky Bernsteins go-play to compile with go-assetfs and run from a single executable. Get it here!

Why and How

iPython is one of the things I love best about Python. In a dynamically typed language its a huge benefit to be able to quickly and easily paste in chunks of code and investigate what the actual output would be or what an error situation would look like.

Go is not dynamically typed, but many of the same issues tend to apply - when errors rise they can be tricky to introspect without diving through the code, and sometimes the syntax or results of a function call aren't obvious.

As a learning tool, Go provides the Go Playground - a web service which compiles and runs snippets of Go code within a sandbox, which has proven a huge boon to the community for sharing and testing solutions (its very popular on Stack Overflow).

The public Go playground is necessariy limited - and it would be nice to be able to use Go in the same way clientside, or just without internet access.

Fortunately Rocky Bernstein pulled together an unrestricted copy of the Go play ground which runs as a client-side HTML5 app. Unlike the web playground, this allows unrestricted Go execution on your PC and full testing of things as they would work locally. The Github export is found here.

The one problem I had with this was that this version still exposed dependencies on the location of source files outside the executable - which for a tiny tool was kind of annoying. Fortunately this has been solved in Go for a long time - and a little fun with go-bindata-assetfs yielded my own version which once built runs completely locally.

Get it here. It's fully go-gettable too so go get github.com/wrouesnel/go-play will work too.