ebitengine/purego

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3806 stars · 125 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

purego is a Go library for calling C functions from Go without using Cgo, using assembly-based FFI and runtime symbol loading. It enables pure-Go cross-compilation, dynamic linking, and calling into shared objects from other languages.

Use cases

• call C functions from Go without Cgo
• cross-compile Go binaries without a C compiler
• load shared library symbols at runtime as a plugin system
• call into Rust or other languages compiled to shared objects
• reduce binary size by avoiding Cgo wrappers
• incrementally port a Cgo project to pure Go

When to choose

• you need C interop in Go but want CGO_ENABLED=0 builds and easy cross-compilation
• you want dynamic loading of shared libraries at runtime
• you target Tier 1 platforms (Linux/macOS/Windows amd64+arm64, mobile)

When to avoid

• you need struct-by-value arguments on Tier 2 architectures
• you rely on Cgo-specific tooling or cgo packages
• you need guaranteed stability - it is beta software with potential API changes

Facets

library · maturity active

sdk developer-tools developer-tools cross-platform programming-languages go windows cross-platform ffi cgo-alternative foreign-function-interface dynamic-linking shared-libraries assembly linux macos android ios

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="ebitengine/purego")