golangconfig Design

The golangconfig Sublime Text dependency was designed based on the following ideas:

• Settings should be supported coming from the following sources, in order:

  • Sublime Text project files under the golang key
  • Any golang.sublime-settings files
  • The user's shell environment, as defined by invoking their login shell

• The project and global Sublime Text settings will also allow for placing settings in a platform-specific sub-dictionary to allow users to easily work across different operating systems. The keys for these are used by other ST packages to allow for platform-specific functionality:

  • “osx”
  • “windows”
  • “linux”

• Platform-specific settings are always higher priority than non-platform-specific, no matter what source they are pulled from

• Setting names that are core to Go configuration preserve the uppercase style of environment variables. Thus the settings are named GOPATH, GOROOT, PATH, etc.

• When returning results, the value requested is returned along with a user-friendly source description that can be used when displaying configuration details to the user

• The API eschews duck-typing in an attempt to prevent various edge-case bugs. This is largely due to the weak-typing issues of strings in Python 2 where byte strings and unicode strings are often mixed, only to cause exceptions at runtime on user machines where errors are harder to capture.