Eliminating build dependency on Go

[inejge]

Currently, building Mundane requires Go 1.11+. Utilities in Go are used for three tasks:

1. Generating the interned error message bundle and its index (crypto/err_data.c in the build tree, from crypto/err/*.errordata in the source tree).

2. Extracting the names of public symbols from the archive created in the first library build (crypto/libcrypto.a) and saving the result in symbols.txt above the two build directories.

3. Generating the headers with substitutions from regular to versioned symbol names, using the result of the previous utility.

Those are rather simple programs and I have reimplemented them in Rust without much difficulty. Integrating them into build.rs could lead to elimination of Go as a build dependency of Mundane. While having any single dependency is not particularly onerous, I believe that minimizing their number eases the acceptance of a package, both for developers and end users. Even more so since Go 1.11 is not available on current LTS versions of popular distros.

Would there be any interest of pursuing this further?

[joshlf]

I would absolutely be interested in this! I'm particularly interested in (2) and (3), as I expect I should be able to pre-generate crypto/err_data.c at code commit time.

Also, if you're interested in taking this one step further (not necessarily now, but at some point in the future), I've been hoping to eliminate the need for the two-phase build entirely by updating the libcrypto.a file in place in order to rename symbols. That's probably a much more involved project, but just wanted to put it on your radar in case you're curious.

[Ralith]

It looks like (2) and (3) were fixed in 504093a and d0e5361 respectively. Should this be closed, or do we want to write a rust script for (1) too?

[joshlf]

IIUC, we'll still need (1) in order to fully remove the dependency on Go, even if we remove CMake and drive the compilation manually from the build script. @davidben, correct me if I'm wrong on that?

[BusyJay]

You can use the branch "master-with-bazel" or "chromium-stable-with-bazel" maintained by boringssl team to get rid of go.