Recently I started writing a tool for converting C to Go.

I created this project as a proof of concept. It is written in python and uses the python clang bindingsto do the vast majority of the hard work.

Real Example

One of the examplesin the repository is prime.c:

#include <stdio.h> int main()

{

int n, c; printf("Enter a number

");

scanf("%d", &n); if ( n == 2 )

printf("Prime number.

");

else

{

for ( c = 2 ; c <= n - 1 ; c++ )

{

if ( n % c == 0 )

break;

}

if ( c != n )

printf("Not prime.

");

else

printf("Prime number.

");

}

return 0;

}

Execute:

python c2go.py tests/prime.c

Will produce:

package main import (

"fmt"

) // ... lots of system types in Go removed for brevity. func main() {

var n int

var c int

fmt.Printf("Enter a number

")

fmt.Scanf("%d", &n)

if n == 2 {

fmt.Printf("Prime number.

")

} else {

for c = 2; c <= n - 1; c += 1 {

if n % c == 0 {

break

}

}

if c != n {

fmt.Printf("Not prime.

")

} else {

fmt.Printf("Prime number.

")

}

}

return

}

This is the process:

The C code is preprocessed with clang. This generates a larger file, but removes all the platform specific directives and macros. The new file is parsed with the clang AST which has bindings with python. Apart from just parsing the C and exposing an AST, the AST contains all of the resolved information (such as data types) that a compiler would need. This means that the code must compile successfully under clang for the AST to also be usable. Since we have all the types in the AST it’s just a matter of traversing the tree is a semi-intelligent way and producing Go.

Testing

Testing is done with a set of integrations tests in the form of complete C programs that can be found in the tests directory.

For each of those files:

Clang compiles the C to a binary as normal. c2go.pyconverts the C file to Go. The Go is built to produce another binary. Both binaries are executed and the output is compared. All C files will contain some output. The test suite is run with run-tests.sh.

Feel Like Contributing?

As I said it is just a proof of concept (sorry for all the hacky Python).

Contributing is done with pull requests. If you’re looking a place to to start I can suggesting finding a simple C program (like the other examples) that does not successfully translate to Go and fixing up the Python so that it does.