How do I use a cgo-based package on Windows?

Question

The regexp in the Go's standard library is quite poor, so I need a more powerful engine, like regex in Python (pip install regex), supporting recursion, backref, look-ahead/behind, etc... .

I found: https://godoc.org/github.com/dlclark/regexp2 .NET compatible, which was quite fine; however, recursion is not working properly.

and several bindings to PCRE, for example: https://godoc.org/github.com/glenn-brown/golang-pkg-pcre/src/pkg/pcre

so, how can I use this binding on Win64?

Answer 1

You may consider using C++ standard library std::regex (no third-party library). Wrap the logic in try block, use catch(...){return ERROR;} to catch any error, and declare the C function extern "C" so you can call with cgo.

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From https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/cgo (there is a part about Windows):

In order to use cgo on Windows, you'll also need to first install a gcc compiler (for instance, mingw-w64) and have gcc.exe (etc.) in your PATH environment variable before compiling with cgo will work.

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That being said, I still think you should consider sticking with the regexp package and try to make regular expressions as simple as possible. Because complicated regular expressions are likely to hurt readability of code. Another problem is sometimes they introduce subtle bugs which are difficult to spot and fix. So writing more code in Go instead of regex may actually make the life easier.