如何不使用cgo将Go函数绑定到C调用？

Question

In a project I'm working on I need to use a bunch of C functions from Go. The current implementation is using cgo to achieve that, but doing so has a massive performance impact, which I am trying to remove.

• cgo marks all C code as a syscall, causing the scheduler to allocate a new thread if needed. Since ~80% of the CPU time in my project is spent doing the heavy C work, this quickly results in having a lot of threads (500+ instead of GOMAXPROCS (= 8)), which my Linux kernel does not like much.
• Doing the usual 'limiter' approach (have a buffered channel lock the cgo calls) results in a lot of mutexes, slowing the program down.

I want to keep using Go for this project as it's a great way of managing concurrency.

Things I have tried :

• Comment out some stuff like entersyscall() in src/runtime/cgocall.go (didn't seem to help much, and I'd prefer to avoid modifying the Go code).
• Put my code in a .c file and call it from Go, without the import "C". No luck here - I couldn't call the function and when I wrote the function names as package·function the compiler complained about invalid characters in the file.
• Use a .s file and just write it as assembly. My asm isn't that great and I couldn't figure it out.

So, my question is: how does one use C functions from Go while avoiding the overhead of cgo?

Side note: I'm aware of why cgo marks all calls as a syscall, but in this specific case the functions I call do not block on locks or IO.

Answer 1

What you want to do is not possible. There is a reason that C code has a high overhead, which is that C code uses a different ABI (the platform's native ABI) which doesn't support the short stacks Go uses. Thus whenever Go code calls C code, execution has to continue on the threads native stack. This causes the overhead you see. There is no^† way to remove this overhead. Think about it: If the overhead wasn't needed, it wouldn't exist.

It's hard to say what you should do instead without knowing what your program looks like.

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^†You could compile your C code with the C compiler from the Go project, but that compiler doesn't optimize nearly as well as gcc or clang do and your code will definitely break in a future version of Go as that compiler is not part of any stable interface.