signalk server implementation in go

[wdantuma]

Hi all,

First let me thank you all for the awesome work done on signalk and canboat.

As a fun holiday project i started writing a signalk server in go it is far from complete but the webapps freeboard-sk and instrumentpanel sort of work now with a demo input file.

A real can source is not yet implemented but will be in the coming weeks, my holiday has come to an end so don't expect daily updates from now

signalk-server-go

[sbender9]

What's your plan for canboat integration?

[wdantuma]

I'am not sure if i understand your question correct, but from canboat the canboat.xsd and canboat.xml files are used to generate go structs and "parse" the can frames, the transformation from canboat to signalk happens more or less the same as n2k-signalk does it

[sbender9]

Wow. Ok, implementing your own n2k parser with all those intricacies and possible input forms is a huge undertaking. You sure you don't want to fork a canboat/js process at least for starters?

[wdantuma]

Actually after being pointed to signalk by @keesverruijt trying to install signalk-server on my target hardware ( RPi Zero W with a PiCAN board and a readonly FS ) was the first thing i started with, but ended up with a nodejs dependency horror ( no recent builds of nodejs available for ArmV6 hardware). This is what made me to implement my own signalk server in go ( native and hopefully more resource friendly ).

The plan for now is to make it usable for my own use case ( boat), almost there, and i see where it ends

[keesverruijt]

If you're starting from zero, I suggest a Rust implementation instead of Go. Much faster and even more resource friendly.

[wdantuma]

I know, but learning Rust and implement a working signalk server was a bit to much work, for the few days i had to my disposal in my vacation ( i need longer/more vacations ;-))

[TimVosch]

I don't think Rust would have a significant improvements over Go in the SBC area. The biggest advantage over the current JS implementation would be a binary and significantly lower overhead, both Go and Rust will provide that :)
Personally I think Go is also easier to read and develop for new comers than Rust. But that might just be my lack of Rust knowledge.

@wdantuma do you have any specific approach/designs to implementing this? I've been messing around with replicating signalk in Go as well, although most of my time was figuring out a typed way to implement the data structure.

[wdantuma]

You can find the repo here https://github.com/wdantuma/signalk-server-go

[tkurki]

There's also https://github.com/munnik/gosk