Initial GoLang Support

[ashvardanian]

Together with @MarkReedZ we've added basic GoLang bindings to StringZilla, which look surprisingly fast compared to native GoLang strings. We currently use the new cGo annotations available in Go 1.24:

Cgo has gained new capabilities in Go 1.24, supporting new C function annotations to improve runtime performance. Among them, #cgo noescape cFunctionName is used to inform the compiler that the memory passed to cFunctionname will not escape; #cgo nocallback cFunctionName indicates that this C function will not call back any Go functions. In addition, Cgo's inspection of multiple incompatible declarations of C functions has become more stringent. When there are incompatible declarations in different files, errors can be detected and reported more timely and accurately.

I was using an Intel Sapphire Rapids machine on AWS for preliminary testing and benchmarking. I've precompiled StringZilla with dynamic dispatch enabled, linked to the thin GoLang binding layer:

$ ~/StringZilla/golang$ CGO_CFLAGS="-I$(pwd)/../include" \
        CGO_LDFLAGS="-L$(pwd)/../build_golang -lstringzilla_shared" \
        LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$(pwd)/../build_golang:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" \
        go run ../scripts/bench.go  --input ../leipzig1M.txt --split lines --seed 42

... and compared to native GoLang strings on some key operations:

Benchmarking on `../leipzig1M.txt` with seed 42.
Total input length: 129644797
Total lines: 1000000
Average line length: 128.64
Running benchmark using `testing.Benchmark`.
strings.Contains              :      309           3818144 ns/op
sz.Contains                   :      664           1881251 ns/op
strings.Index                 :      325           3669081 ns/op
sz.Index                      :      624           1990093 ns/op
strings.LastIndex             :       12          85201713 ns/op
sz.LastIndex                  :      494           2306318 ns/op
strings.IndexAny              :  6321228             181.0 ns/op
sz.IndexAny                   : 10608960             112.6 ns/op
strings.Count                 :      156           8015292 ns/op
sz.Count (non-overlap)        :      285           4206698 ns/op
sz.Count (overlap)            :      284           4204370 ns/op

So if you are processing a lot of text in Go, try doing so with StringZilla and stay tuned for the upcoming 4.0 release #201 🥳