fmtless: All the convenience of fmt without the bloat
by Cathal Garvey, ©2016, Released under the GNU AGPLv3 or later
Why Avoid fmt?
The fmt library is a super-rich way to present and parse data
in your Go application. I love fmt; everyone loves fmt!
However, fmt is really big, adding a large premium to output
binaries. For straight compilation to static binaries, this isn't
usually a dealbreaker (cf. the success of Go overall).
However, in edge-cases, like embedding Go in storage-constrained
devices, or shipping a collection of small apps in Go, or when
transpiling to JS, the
premium can be really costly. In my own experience, removing fmt
from a GopherJS application removed 0.5Mb from the output Javascript,
which can be a huge deal when shipping JS.
Most fmt imports seem to use it only for output, or for errors.
So, fmtless is a toolkit for rapidly porting software using fmt
for output and errors, hopefully only requiring a single-line change:
instead of import "fmt", just do import "github.com/cathalgarvey/fmtless"!
fmtless also has mirrors of Go's standard libraries with fmt replaced
with fmtless, to reduce binary size. Try switching over and see if it
makes a difference to your application!
At present the included stdlibs in this repo are lifted directly from my local install. In the future I plan to have a script pull chosen libraries directly from the most recent tag/release of Go and converts them.
Usage
Right now, it's just replace fmt with github.com/cathalgarvey/fmtless.
For stdlibs, likewise, it's just "prepend your stdlib imports with
github.com/cathalgarvey/fmtless". Currently supported:
encoding/json(was only using stdlibs for errors)encoding/xml(was only using stdlibs for errors)net/url(was only using stdlibs for errors)