go-operators

README

Disclaimer: This is a hack!

This project is an attempt to add operator overloading to the Go language. There are very good reasons why Go doesn't support operator overloading as part of the language and I fully support and agree with those reasons.

That being said, there are a few valid cases where it makes sense to have operators defined for types other than the builtin types. One such valid case, in my opinion, is for numeric types such as vectors or matrices. Of course, Go was never designed for writing numeric heavy programs, so you could just argue that Go is simply not the right tool for the job. Although I wouldn't disagree with this, I still find Go an exceptionally enjoyable language and recently I really wanted to write some vector-ish code.

go-operators allows you to add support for all Go operators to any custom defined type, by adding appropriate methods on that type. The way this works is that go-operators is a kind of preprocessor for your Go code which will parse and rewrite your original source to map operators, on types which do not natively support operators, to method calls on the operand(s) of the operator.

First, the original source is converted to an AST by using the builtin go/ast package. Then, a patched version of go/types (available in go.tools) steps through the AST and resolves the types of all the expressions in the AST. When an operator is encountered which operators on non-numeric types, a method lookup is performed on the first operand type. If the appropriate operator overloading method can be found (with the correct operands type and return type), then the AST node representing the operator is replaced with a method call. For binary operators, if the first operand does not have an appropriate overloaded method, the second operator is tested for a Pre- overload method. This way you can overload both v * 5.0 and 5.0 * v (for example) on the type of v.

Using go-operators

To use go-operators you will have to define special methods on your custom type. These methods are prefixed with Op_Multiply, Op_Add, Op_Subtract etc., depending on the operator to overload. Any method which has such a prefix is a potential candidate. Thus, if your type supports operators on various operand types, then you can add methods such as Op_MultiplyVec3, Op_MultiplyMat3, etc. with the appropriate argument types. The return type of the method can be anything, but there must be extactly one return value. For overloaded binary operators there must be exactly one argument while for overloaded unary operators there must be exactly zero arguments.

The go-operators tool uses a set of conventions to parse and process files for which to replace operators. Each file which needs to be processed should have the .op.go suffix. Furthermore, these files should have the operators build constraint (// +build operators). go-operators parses these files and generates a corresponding .go file (stripping the .op.go suffix) in the same directory, adding the !operators build constraint to avoid conflicts. You run go-operators with the import paths of the packages you want to process. These packages are obtained from $GOPATH/src.

List of overloaded operators

Operator	Method Prefix
a + b	Op_Add
a - b	Op_Subtract
a * b	Op_Multiply
a / b	Op_Divide
a % b	Op_Modulo
a & b	Op_BitAnd
a | b	Op_BitOr
a << b	Op_BitShiftLeft
a >> b	Op_BitShiftRight
a &^ b	Op_BitAndNot
a ^ b	Op_BitXor
a && b	Op_And
a || b	Op_Or
a < b	Op_Less
a > b	Op_Greater
a <= b	Op_LessOrEqual
a >= b	Op_GreaterOrEqual
-a	Op_Minus
+a	Op_Add
!a	Op_Not

Binary operator methods should have one argument and unary operator methods should have zero arguments. To support pre-operator methods (i.e. methods defined on b instead of a), then you can add the same method but prefixed with Op_Pre instead of just Op_. Note that the prefixes for binary and unary methods is the same and they are differentiated by their arguments. Therefore, to support both unary minus and binary minus (for example), you could write:

func (t T) Op_MinusBinary(o T) T {
  // ...
}

func (t T) Op_MinusUnary() T {
  // ...
}

Not using go-operators

There is much to say for not using go-operators. I already mentioned that it's a hack, right? Using go-operators relies on a preprocessing step which, although fairly robust, is subject to bugs. The go/types project is still in development and certain constructs are bound not to be correctly parsed (yet). Additionally, using go-operators makes your project no longer go-gettable since a preprocessing step needs to be performed before the code is actually usable.

Example

package main

import (
	"fmt"
)

type vec4 [4]float32

func (v vec4) Op_Multiply(o vec4) vec4 {
	return vec4{v[0] * o[0], v[1] * o[1], v[2] * o[2], v[3] * o[3]}
}

func (v vec4) Op_MultiplyScalar(o float32) vec4 {
	return vec4{v[0] * o, v[1] * o, v[2] * o, v[3] * o}
}

func (v vec4) Op_PreMultiplyScalar(o float32) vec4 {
	return v.Op_MultiplyScalar(o)
}

func (v vec4) Op_Add(o vec4) vec4 {
	return vec4{v[0] + o[0], v[1] + o[1], v[2] + o[2], v[3] + o[3]}
}

func (v vec4) Op_AddScalar(o float32) vec4 {
	return vec4{v[0] + o, v[1] + o, v[2] + o, v[3] + o}
}

func (v vec4) Op_PreAddScalar(o float32) vec4 {
	return v.Op_AddScalar(o)
}

func (v vec4) Op_Subtract(o vec4) vec4 {
	return vec4{v[0] - o[0], v[1] - o[1], v[2] - o[2], v[3] - o[3]}
}

func (v vec4) Op_SubtractScalar(o float32) vec4 {
	return vec4{v[0] - o, v[1] - o, v[2] - o, v[3] - o}
}

func (v vec4) Op_PreSubtractScalar(o float32) vec4 {
	return vec4{o - v[0], o - v[1], o - v[2], o - v[3]}
}

func ExampleOverload() {
	v1 := vec4{1, 2, 3, 4}
	v2 := vec4{5, 6, 7, 8}

	// Generates: ret := v1.Op_PreMultiplyScalar(2).Op_Multiply(v2).Op_Add(v1).Op_SubtractScalar(4)
	ret := 2*v1*v2 + v1 - 4

	fmt.Println(ret)
}