README.md

golang-ecal

A high-level interface from GO to eCAL based on a low-level interface generated via SWIG.

Status

This is the initial version providing an abstraction of the SWIG-generated low-level interface for initialization, publishers and subscribers.

ecal: This is the high-level interface. It allows initialization, data publishing and reception.

ecalc: This is the pure SWIG-generated low-level interface.

As the full low-level interface is accessible, you can do whatever the eCAL C interface allows you to do. More GO-like approaches like channels are only available via the high-level interface and thus are currently limited to publishers and subscribers. The publisher and subscriber interface are complete excluding event callbacks. Services and other functionality are currently only available via the low-level ecalc interface.

Usage

GO is about simplicity, so the high-level interface initializes a lot of settings with defaults if you do not call the initialization functions yourself.

Simple Publisher

This publisher corresponds to the ecal_sample_minimal_snd example coming with eCAL. It is able to communicate with ecal_sample_minimal_rec or with the "Simple Subscriber" example. You can also call

$ golang-ecal minimal_snd

to have a simple publisher running.

package main

import (
    "log"
    "time"

    "github.com/Blutkoete/golang-ecal/ecal"
)

func main() {
    pub, pubChannel, err := ecal.PublisherCreate("Hello", "base:std::string", "", true)
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    defer pub.Destroy()

    count := 0
    for ecal.Ok() {
        message := ecal.Message{Content: []byte(fmt.Sprintf("Hello World from Go (%d)", count)),
                                Timestamp: -1}
        count += 1
        select {
        case pubChannel <- message:
            log.Printf("Sent \"%s\"\n", message.Content)
        case <-time.After(time.Second):
        }
        <-time.After(250 * time.Millisecond)
    }
}

Simple Subscriber

This subscriber corresponds to the ecal_sample_minimal_rec example coming with eCAL. It is able to communicate with ecal_sample_minimal_snd or with the "Simple Publisher" example. You can also call

$ golang-ecal minimal_rec

to have a simple subscriber running.

package main

import (
    "log"
    "time"

    "github.com/Blutkoete/golang-ecal/ecal"
)

func main() {
    sub, subChannel, err := ecal.SubscriberCreate("Hello", "base:std::string", "", true, 1024)
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    defer sub.Destroy()

    for ecal.Ok() {
        select {
        case message := <-subChannel:
            log.Printf("Received \"%s\"\n", message.Content)
        case <-time.After(time.Second):
        }
    }
}

Other examples

golang-ecal_sample implements two more examples: Sending and receiving protobuf messages via eCAL.

$ golang-ecal person_snd

corresponds to ecal_sample_person_snd and

$ golang-ecal person_rec

to ecal_sample_person_rec. For reading eCAL protobuf messages, it basically boils down to very few lines for unmarshalling the []byte message content:

...
case message := <-subChannel:
person := &pbexample.Person{}
proto.Unmarshal(message.Content, person)
log.Printf("Received \"%s\"\n", person)
...

See the source of golang-ecal_sample for more details.