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

[Sounkou Mahamane Toure]

Thanks Simon, Thomas, Dewey and Henrik for the helpful information and
feedback !

Given the restrictions on the go side for the c-shared mode and the fact
that the plugin system that would allow loading safely different go modules
are not portable, I think an IPC road may be more productive.

Given this and the fact that we have a very good Nanomsg binding in R and
there is an official Go version, I will be using that setup for R/Go
interops. Following Dewey, I made a package that vendors the Go binding of
Nanomsg that I hope to submit to CRAN. This setup only requires a suitable
go version (in this case >= 1.21).


Thanks again

Sounkou Mahamane Toure

[1] https://pkg.go.dev/plugin#hdr-Warnings
[2] https://github.com/r-lib/nanonext
[3] https://github.com/nanomsg/mangos
[4] mangoro package https://github.com/sounkou-bioinfo/mangoro

Le lun. 20 oct. 2025 à 11:09, Henrik Bengtsson <henrik.bengtsson using gmail.com>
a écrit :

> > I had to do this to keep the tarball under 5 MB
>
> Not widely advertised, but this limit was recently increased; "Source
> package tarballs should if possible not exceed 10MB." (
> https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html)
>
> /Henrik
>
> On Sun, Oct 19, 2025, 19:39 Dewey Dunnington <dewey using dunnington.ca> wrote:
>
>> 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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