With the release of Go 1.8 came a feature long-sought by many developers -- support for modular plug-ins loadable at runtime. While Go plug-ins do have some limitations today -- primarily being Linux only at this time -- they are still incredibly useful.

Unless a project has vendored dependencies that is.

The utility of Go plug-ins is almost completely erased by fact that many Go projects rely on vendored dependencies in order to ensure consistent build results.

The problem is pretty straight-forward. When an application (app) vendors a library (lib), the package path of the library is now path/to/app/vendor/path/to/lib. However, the plug-in is likely built against either path/to/lib or, if the plug-in vendors dependencies as well, path/to/plugin/vendor/path/to/lib.

This of course makes total sense and behaves exactly as one would expect with regards to Go packages. Despite the intent, these three packages are not the same:

• path/to/lib
• path/to/app/vendor/path/to/lib
• path/to/plugin/vendor/path/to/lib

While the behavior is consistent with regards to Go packages, it flies in the face of the utility provided by a combination of vendored dependencies and the new Go plug-in model.

This project makes it easy to reproduce the above issue.

To reproduce this issue Go 1.8.x and a Linux host are required:

$ go version
go version go1.8.1 linux/amd64

$ go env
GOARCH="amd64"
GOBIN=""
GOEXE=""
GOHOSTARCH="amd64"
GOHOSTOS="linux"
GOOS="linux"
GOPATH="/home/akutz/go"
GORACE=""
GOROOT="/home/akutz/.go/1.8.1"
GOTOOLDIR="/home/akutz/.go/1.8.1/pkg/tool/linux_amd64"
GCCGO="gccgo"
CC="gcc"
GOGCCFLAGS="-fPIC -m64 -pthread -fmessage-length=0 -fdebug-prefix-map=/tmp/go-build699913681=/tmp/go-build -gno-record-gcc-switches"
CXX="g++"
CGO_ENABLED="1"
PKG_CONFIG="pkg-config"
CGO_CFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_CPPFLAGS=""
CGO_CXXFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_FFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_LDFLAGS="-g -O2"

On a Linux host use go get to fetch this project:

$ go get github.com/akutz/gpd

The root of the project is a Go command-line program. Running it will emit a message to the console:

$ go run main.go
Yes, we have no bananas,
We have no bananas today.

If the program is run with a single argument it is treated as the path to a Go plug-in. That plug-in is loaded and will emit a different message to the console. First, build the plug-in:

$ go build -buildmode plugin -o mod.so ./mod

To verify that the produced file is a plug-in, use the file command:

$ file mod.so
mod.so: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, BuildID[sha1]=8c78f9a393bd083bde91b2b34b8117592387f40e, not stripped

The file is reported as a shared object, verifying that it is indeed a Go plug-in.

Run the program using the plug-in:

$ go run main.go mod.so
Yes there were thirty, thousand, pounds...
Of...bananas.

It works!

However, what happens when the program vendors the shared dep package?

$ mkdir -p vendor/github.com/akutz/gpd && cp -r dep vendor/github.com/akutz/gpd
$ go run main.go mod.so
error: failed to load plugin: plugin.Open: plugin was built with a different version of package github.com/akutz/gpd/lib
panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference
[signal SIGSEGV: segmentation violation code=0x1 addr=0x0 pc=0x504c45]

goroutine 1 [running]:
github.com/akutz/gpd/lib.NewModule(0x535498, 0x6, 0x539cb5, 0x21)
	/home/akutz/go/src/github.com/akutz/gpd/lib/lib.go:28 +0x55
main.main()
	/home/akutz/go/src/github.com/akutz/gpd/main.go:32 +0x13a
exit status 2

The program fails!

This is because the dep package includes a type that is used by both the shared lib package and the plug-in package, mod.

The plug-in linked against the lib package at github.com/akutz/gpd/lib which itself linked against the dep package at github.com/akutz/gpd/dep.

However, vendoring the dep package for the program causes the lib package as compiled into the program to link against github.com/akutz/gpd/vendor/github.com/akutz/gpd/dep, resulting in the program and the plug-in having two different versions of the lib package!

However, what happens when the program vendors the shared lib package?

$ rm -fr vendor
$ mkdir -p vendor/github.com/akutz/gpd && cp -r lib vendor/github.com/akutz/gpd
$ go run main.go mod.so
panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference
[signal SIGSEGV: segmentation violation code=0x1 addr=0x0 pc=0x504d65]

goroutine 1 [running]:
github.com/akutz/gpd/vendor/github.com/akutz/gpd/lib.NewModule(0x5355b8, 0x6, 0xc42000c2c0, 0x0)
	/home/akutz/go/src/github.com/akutz/gpd/vendor/github.com/akutz/gpd/lib/lib.go:28 +0x55
main.main()
	/home/akutz/go/src/github.com/akutz/gpd/main.go:32 +0x13a
exit status 2

The program fails! This is because the lib package contains a type registry that can be used to both register types and construct new instances of those types.

However, because the program's type registry is located in the package github.com/akutz/gpd/vendor/github.com/akutz/gpd/lib and the plug-in registered its type with github.com/akutz/gpd/lib, when the program requests a new object for the type mod_go, a nil exception occurs because the program and plug-in were accessing two different type registries!

At the moment the only solution available is to create a build toolchain using a list of transitive dependencies generated from the application that is responsible for loading the plug-ins. This list of dependencies can be used to create a custom GOPATH against which any projects participating in the application must be built, including the application itself, any shared libraries, and the plug-ins.

Is there one? Two possible solutions are:

1. Allow a src directory at the root of a vendor directory so that plug-ins can be built directly against a program's vendor directory. Today that would require a bind mount.
2. Allow plug-ins to link directly against the Go program binary that will load the programs.

Hopefully the Golang team can solve this issue as it really does prevent Go plug-ins from being useful in a world where applications are often required to vendor dependencies.