Code Generation

Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash I wrote a small toy for loading configuration easily from multiple sources. I was thinking a lot about it, even wrote a whole post. Here’s a link to it The Problem I wanted a 100% opinionated library that would let me define a Go struct with the expected values and let it generate code that loads configuration from multiple sources, simultaneously: The default configuration will be defined in a yaml file The values in the config file can be overridden by environment variables, and those environment variables can be overridden by passing flags in the commandline....

Photo by Iñaki del Olmo on Unsplash Code Generation is a form of Metaprogramming From the early days of the C programming language, to today’s cutting edge languages, some sort of meta programming technique is used. By “meta programming”, I mean any form of programming that adds functionality to the code you write, without actually writing that extra functionality. According to Wikipedia: Metaprogramming […] means a program can be designed to read, generate, analyze or transform other programs, and even modify itself while running....

A Declarative Configuration lib for Go I’m thinking about building a Go package (and CLI) to let me just declare a schema of a config, and use code generation on top of that to declare how I want to Marshal and Unmarshal it into anything that makes sense. I want to try to make a case in favor of writing it before I actually roll up my sleeves and write it....