tinygo-org/tinygo

TinyGo is a Go compiler intended for use in small places such as microcontrollers, WebAssembly (wasm/wasi), and command-line tools.

It reuses libraries used by the Go language tools alongside LLVM to provide an alternative way to compile programs written in the Go programming language.

Here is an example program that blinks the built-in LED when run directly on any supported board with onboard LED:

package main

import (
    "machine"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    led := machine.LED
    led.Configure(machine.PinConfig{Mode: machine.PinOutput})
    for {
        led.Low()
        time.Sleep(time.Millisecond * 1000)

        led.High()
        time.Sleep(time.Millisecond * 1000)
    }
}

The above program can be compiled and run without modification on an Arduino Uno, an Adafruit Circuit Playground Express, a Seeed Studio XIAO-ESP32S3 or any of the many supported boards that have a built-in LED, just by setting the correct TinyGo compiler target. For example, this compiles and flashes an Arduino Uno:

tinygo flash -target arduino-uno examples/blinky1

TinyGo is very useful for compiling programs both for use in browsers (WASM) as well as for use on servers and other edge devices (WASI).

TinyGo programs can run in Fastly Compute, Fermyon Spin, wazero and many other WebAssembly runtimes.

Here is a small TinyGo program for use by a WASI host application:

package main

//go:wasmexport add
func add(x, y uint32) uint32 {
	return x + y
}

This compiles the above TinyGo program for use on any WASI Preview 1 runtime:

tinygo build -buildmode=c-shared -o add.wasm -target=wasip1 add.go

You can also use the same syntax as Go 1.24+:

GOOS=wasip1 GOARCH=wasm tinygo build -buildmode=c-shared -o add.wasm add.go

See the getting started instructions for information on how to install TinyGo, as well as how to run the TinyGo compiler using our Docker container.

You can compile TinyGo programs for over 150 different microcontroller boards.

For more information, please see https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/microcontrollers/

TinyGo programs can be compiled for both WASM and WASI targets.

For more information, see https://tinygo.org/docs/guides/webassembly/

You can also compile programs for Linux, macOS, and Windows targets.

For more information:

• Linux https://tinygo.org/docs/guides/linux/

• macOS https://tinygo.org/docs/guides/macos/

• Windows https://tinygo.org/docs/guides/windows/

For a description of currently supported Go language features, please see https://tinygo.org/lang-support/.

Documentation is located on our web site at https://tinygo.org/.

You can find the web site code at https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo-site.

If you're looking for a more interactive way to discuss TinyGo usage or development, we have a #TinyGo channel on the Gophers Slack.

If you need an invitation for the Gophers Slack, you can generate one here which should arrive fairly quickly (under 1 min): https://invite.slack.golangbridge.org

Your contributions are welcome!

Please take a look at our Contributing page on our web site for details.

Goals:

• Have very small binary sizes. Don't pay for what you don't use.
• Support for most common microcontroller boards.
• Be usable on the web using WebAssembly.
• Good CGo support, with no more overhead than a regular function call.
• Support most standard library packages and compile most Go code without modification.

Non-goals:

• Be efficient while using zillions of goroutines. However, good goroutine support is certainly a goal.
• Be as fast as gc. However, LLVM will probably be better at optimizing certain things so TinyGo might actually turn out to be faster for number crunching.
• Be able to compile every Go program out there.

We never expected Go to be an embedded language, and so it’s got serious problems...

-- Rob Pike, GopherCon 2014 Opening Keynote

TinyGo is a project to bring Go to microcontrollers and small systems with a single processor core. It is similar to emgo but a major difference is that we want to keep the Go memory model (which implies garbage collection of some sort). Another difference is that TinyGo uses LLVM internally instead of emitting C, which hopefully leads to smaller and more efficient code and certainly leads to more flexibility.

The original reasoning was: if Python can run on microcontrollers, then certainly Go should be able to run on even lower level micros.

This project is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license, just like the Go project itself.

Some code has been copied from the LLVM project and is therefore licensed under a variant of the Apache 2.0 license. This has been clearly indicated in the header of these files.

Some code has been copied and/or ported from Paul Stoffregen's Teensy libraries and is therefore licensed under PJRC's license. This has been clearly indicated in the header of these files.