Go-SDL with callback support: done!

It is always fashioning to discover the type of big challenges that can arise from an apparently trivial task, like porting an ncurses game to Go! language. It's like watching the unexpected chessboard developments that can happen between two beginners.

This time I wanted to add support for sound through SDL_Audio, so I came up with a decent square-wave generator and started using this Go-SDL fork for audio output.
Problem: SDL audio works with samples or callbacks, and my samples are generated on the fly, being simple PC-buzzer-like sounds.

Strangely enough, that Go-SDL package I found uses a very complex architecture of mutexes and hard-coded hacks to simulate possibility of sending audio synchronously from Go, and only continuous streaming is supported, no custom samples playing, although the API fingerprint seems like it could support it.

Without continuous playback, my game was condemned to display

ALSA lib pcm.c:7339:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred

 from time to time during gameplay. And that sucks.

The cage of Love where Go
is currently held prisoner without
proper support of C integration

I came in contact with author, and the end of a short discussion I wanted to roll my own version using CGO callbacks, easy done, but then I met this guy:

runtime: cgo callback on thread not created by Go.
runtime: signal received on thread not created by Go.

I digged a bit and found out the reason behind it, basically Go language is not (yet) that well-integrated with C language.
However, thanks to Roger Peppe's callback package it is possible to use C callbacks in Go, like Gordon K. did for PortAudio. It is a hack, but a nice one.
At this point I was going to use PortAudio because it already uses that callback package, but PortAudio has an extra "feature": incredible garbage in the console terminal, and that was not going to be bearable for my little ncurses game.

So I armed my fingers and started coding a fix, here's the result:

https://github.com/neagix/Go-SDL

I removed most mutexes and synchronization black magic and I am now using a single synchronous channel for samples mixing, and it has also support of custom sound-generation callbacks. The cherry on top is that it comes with a nice PC-speaker buzz sound simulator, for all you nostalgic BEEP guys :)

Talk about how much you can learn with a such a simple game :)

At the end of this coding adventure I have to agree with Otstol that it is a huge limitation (to usage&adoption) that Go! language does not sport better callbacks support. I am quite sure all these fireworks will soon be obsolete because the Go Authors will fix this ;)

* = the game in question is Langwar, my battering ram used to discover the Go! language and also bring back what I recognize with some nostalgia as a classic game useful for learning programming

Update 16 June 2013: thanks to G. Klaus for letting me know about Go having fixed the issue, I have now updated my fork of Go-SDL

The sorry status of Go! IDEs

It is indeed the IDE which makes a developer feel powerful or powerless in front of common modern development challenges; I have used the most common IDEs, amongst the best I recall Visual Studio 6, Borland Delphi and NetBeans, that I still use nowadays.

In my recent adventure at using Go! language to port a simple game, I've found that Go! does not (yet) have an IDE made with love and care for the language.

I've tried Go-IDE (horrible MDI, will reopen the same file and cause crosswrites), NetBeans with the (in)famous plugin (IDE will not search into .go extension files, no Ctrl+click support, no nothing, just syntax highlighting) and then reverted back to my good old Geany.

 
Actually I've found that with the changes explained here:

http://go-lang.cat-v.org/text-editors/geany/

It becomes a really good deal. Now back to coding ;)

Update 29 March: I found what I was looking for, golangide, awesome! :)