TinyGo - Go compiler for small places

TinyGo is a Go compiler intended for use in small places such as microcontrollers, WebAssembly (wasm/wasi), and command-line tools.

It reuses libraries used by the Go language tools alongside LLVM to provide an alternative way to compile programs written in the Go programming language.

WebAssembly

TinyGo is very useful for compiling programs both for use in browsers (WASM) as well as for use on servers and other edge devices (WASI).

TinyGo programs can run in Fastly Compute, Fermyon Spin, wazero and many other WebAssembly runtimes.

Here is a small TinyGo program for use by a WASI host application:

package main

//go:wasm-module yourmodulename
//export add
func add(x, y uint32) uint32 {
	return x + y
}

// main is required for the `wasip1` target, even if it isn't used.
func main() {}

This compiles the above TinyGo program for use on any WASI runtime:

tinygo build -o main.wasm -target=wasip1 main.go

Embedded

You can compile TinyGo programs for over 94 different microcontroller boards.

For more information, please see https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/microcontrollers/

WebAssembly

TinyGo programs can be compiled for both WASM and WASI targets.

For more information, see https://tinygo.org/docs/guides/webassembly/

Operating Systems

You can also compile programs for Linux, macOS, and Windows targets.

For more information:

• Linux https://tinygo.org/docs/guides/linux/

• macOS https://tinygo.org/docs/guides/macos/

• Windows https://tinygo.org/docs/guides/windows/

Documentation

Documentation is located on our web site at https://tinygo.org/.

You can find the web site code at https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo-site.

Why this project exists

We never expected Go to be an embedded language and so its got serious problems…

– Rob Pike, GopherCon 2014 Opening Keynote

TinyGo is a project to bring Go to microcontrollers and small systems with a single processor core. It is similar to emgo but a major difference is that we want to keep the Go memory model (which implies garbage collection of some sort). Another difference is that TinyGo uses LLVM internally instead of emitting C, which hopefully leads to smaller and more efficient code and certainly leads to more flexibility.

The original reasoning was: if Python can run on microcontrollers, then certainly Go should be able to run on even lower level micros.