[R-pkg-devel] CRAN Policy on Go using Packages

[Dewey Dunnington]

Hi Sounkou,

I will briefly share the journey of adbcsnowfake, which I submitted to 
CRAN at one point. The CRAN team was kind to help me through the 
process; however, I was unable to resolve an issue with an upstream 
dependency that resulted in a warning (the Snowflake Go driver creates a 
temporary file when the shared object is loaded) and I ran out of time 
to pursue the submission. We distribute using the R-multiverse and have 
never had any requests to distribute it on CRAN, which means either that 
the R-multiverse is sufficient for our users or that nobody is using it.

We use the same idea as for Rust - build a C static library at build 
time and call Go using C. The only time we have ever encountered the 
"multiple go runtimes in the same process cause a crash" issue you 
linked was on MacOS Intel (you can give it a try by attempting to use 
more than one of adbcsnowflake, adbcflightsql, and/or adbcbigquery in 
the same R session). I gather there is also potentially high memory 
usage associated with multiple garbage collected pools that hold on to 
memory in the same process.

I was able to achieve an almost warning-free submission with:

- Using go vendor to create a vendor archive (so that go packages 
weren't downloaded during installation)
- Patch C and/or Go sources in the vendor directory that caused check 
warnings
- Create a tarball of the vendor directory and publish on Zenodo (if I 
were doing this again I'd use GitHub with a Zenodo backup because Zenodo 
is slow). I had to do this to keep the tarball under 5 MB (with fewer 
dependencies this might not be necessary).
- Download the vendor tarball at build time

On Windows we use a standard (i.e., not msys2) Go installation for CI 
and development. There may be issues with doing so but we haven't run 
across them...I gather this works because the Go runtime library is 
completely self-contained but I am not an expert. It is, of course, 
necessary to point go build to the proper C compiler/linker/flags on all 
platforms. At the time I submitted adbcsnowflake, A go installation was 
available on the MacOS runner (which Simon had kindly installed to 
support the submission) but not the Windows one.

After all of that I am not sure that I would recommend building R 
packages with Go dependencies, but it can be done and there are some 
fantastic Go libraries that just don't have equivalents in any other 
language (pmtiles is another great example).

Best of luck!

-dewey

On 2025-10-18 08:35, Sounkou Mahamane Toure wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> 
> I have recently submitted a Go using Package to CRAN and it was
> archived (i have yet to receive the rejection email).
> 
> I have anticipated the warnings (at least on Unix) and made comments
> during the submission. A pointer from Ivan Krylov around the potential
> of crashing R in the case of loading multiple go buildmode c-shared
> loaded in the same process suggests that my comments may have been
> misguided (even though I used the c-archive mode).
> 
> I figure for the fairly limited use case and the existing design
> strategy of limiting communication between the go and C runtime to
> pipes, I can execute an external go process instead. One issue remains
> tough, is that in order to build this binary at installation time, a
> golang toolchain is required.My package failed on win-builder on
> windows because go was not found on the PATH of that machine. And as
> it happens that shipping with the package pre-built cross-compiled
> binaries like it is done in the  pmtiles  package is not advisable,
> options become limited.
> 
> Krilov also referenced the case of the adbcbigquery and allied
> packages that are likely published on r-multiverse instead of CRAN for
> similar reasons.
> 
> It would be great if CRAN were to clarify its views on go using
> packages and the toolchain.
> 
> 
> Thank you in advance
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Sounkou Mahamamane Toure
> 
> References :
> 
> The check on debian can be found here :
> https://win-builder.r-project.org/incoming_pretest/goserveR_0.1.3_20251005_222222/Debian/00check.log
> 
> golang c-shared restrictions : 
> https://github.com/golang/go/issues/65050
> 
> The check on windows :
> https://win-builder.r-project.org/incoming_pretest/goserveR_0.1.3_20251005_222222/Windows/00install.out
> 
> pmtiles builder of cross-compiled binaries :
> https://github.com/walkerke/pmtiles/blob/5fcd3082bb21d5f442d458c42d5165c64c1cf173/tools/build_binaries.sh
> 
> arrow-adbc issue : the https://github.com/apache/arrow-adbc/pull/2262
> 
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> 
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