Trying to Install Lime

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Richard Goulter
Tags: programming.go, programming.lime, programming.editors

Lime is in that category of obscure and in development text editors. If the name isn’t a hint, Lime is a clone of Sublime Text, a popular cross-platform text editor which students will either pirate or just use without registering. (Just like good ol’ WinZip).
(Well, I’m not sure if it’s fair to call these editors “obscure”. NeoVim, LightTable, Atom have 6-8k stars. I thought ST2 was open source, but I can’t find a repo for it).

While a strong motivation for open-source-ness is “yay free stuff”, there’s an interesting comment in the README:

I love the Sublime Text editor. I have created several plugins to make it even better. One thing that scares me though is that it is not open sourced and the pace of nightly releases have recently been anything but nightly, even now that version 3 is out in Beta.

There was a period of about 6 months after the Sublime Text 2 “stable” version was released where pretty much nothing at all was communicated to the users about what to expect in the future, nor was there much support offered in the forums. People including myself were wondering if the product was dead and I personally wondered what would happen to all the bugs, crashes and annoyances that still existed in ST2. This lack of communication is a dealbreaker to me and I decided that I will not spend any more money on that product because of it.

It seems Lime has a ‘backend’ written in Go, with the possibility of writing a frontend in whichever language. (This architecture sounds like what NeoVim is aiming for).

Anyway. I wanted to try and Install it.
I’m not a Go user.
I have run into several difficulties trying to install this on OSX.

After installing dependencies, and then more/less following the “Quickstart” here.

On OSX, trying a Go installation with brew install go isn’t even capable of running go run hello.go as per install instructions here (if hello.go uses package fmt, then it won’t be able to find that).
(Of course, but not apparent to a non-Go user, don’t even try go get whatever without having set GOROOT, GOPATH).

Installing using a .pkg from here, I then get errors as per:

$ go get github.com/limetext/lime/frontend/termbox
# github.com/limetext/gopy/lib
panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference
[signal 0xb code=0x1 addr=0x0 pc=0x15672]
 
goroutine 16 [running]:
runtime.panic(0x1dae60, 0x31b9e4)
    /usr/local/go/src/pkg/runtime/panic.c:279 +0xf5
main.(*typeConv).Type(0x2087f71e0, 0x220838dce0, 0x2086c2ab0, 0x3f43c, 0x26d420)
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/gcc.go:1288 +0x1632
main.(*typeConv).Struct(0x2087f71e0, 0x2087ab8c0, 0x3f43c, 0x6, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/gcc.go:1551 +0x70b
main.(*typeConv).Type(0x2087f71e0, 0x220838dd18, 0x2087ab8c0, 0x3f43c, 0x2087a0101)
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/gcc.go:1234 +0x3038
main.(*typeConv).Type(0x2087f71e0, 0x220838dca8, 0x2086c2990, 0x3f43c, 0x0)
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/gcc.go:1189 +0x3dd6
main.(*typeConv).Struct(0x2087f71e0, 0x2087ab6e0, 0x3f43c, 0x6, 0x0, 0x0, 0x8)
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/gcc.go:1551 +0x70b
main.(*typeConv).Type(0x2087f71e0, 0x220838dd18, 0x2087ab6e0, 0x3f43c, 0x2085ed2c0)
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/gcc.go:1234 +0x3038
main.(*typeConv).Type(0x2087f71e0, 0x220838dce0, 0x2086c2690, 0x3f43c, 0x26d420)
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/gcc.go:1269 +0x1301
main.(*typeConv).Struct(0x2087f71e0, 0x2087ab5c0, 0x3f43c, 0x6, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/gcc.go:1551 +0x70b
main.(*typeConv).Type(0x2087f71e0, 0x220838dd18, 0x2087ab5c0, 0x3f43c, 0x2085368c0)
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/gcc.go:1234 +0x3038
main.(*typeConv).Type(0x2087f71e0, 0x220838dce0, 0x2086c25d0, 0x3f43c, 0x26d420)
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/gcc.go:1269 +0x1301
main.(*typeConv).Struct(0x2087f71e0, 0x2087ab500, 0x3f43c, 0x6, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/gcc.go:1551 +0x70b
main.(*typeConv).Type(0x2087f71e0, 0x220838dd18, 0x2087ab500, 0x3f43c, 0x2085366c0)
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/gcc.go:1234 +0x3038
main.(*typeConv).Type(0x2087f71e0, 0x220838dce0, 0x2086c2510, 0x3f43c, 0x1)
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/gcc.go:1269 +0x1301
main.(*Package).loadDWARF(0x20836ec30, 0x208677180, 0x208698e00, 0x1a, 0x20)
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/gcc.go:541 +0xfb4
main.(*Package).Translate(0x20836ec30, 0x208677180)
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/gcc.go:182 +0x150
main.main()
    /usr/local/go/src/cmd/cgo/main.go:259 +0xef1
 
goroutine 19 [finalizer wait]:
runtime.park(0x4fed0, 0x31feb8, 0x31f269)
    /usr/local/go/src/pkg/runtime/proc.c:1369 +0x89
runtime.parkunlock(0x31feb8, 0x31f269)
    /usr/local/go/src/pkg/runtime/proc.c:1385 +0x3b
runfinq()
    /usr/local/go/src/pkg/runtime/mgc0.c:2644 +0xcf
runtime.goexit()
    /usr/local/go/src/pkg/runtime/proc.c:1445

Presumably this is because CGo wants GCC, not just any C compiler like Clang.
(I’ve also run into GCC vs Clang with Haskell. GHC has a patch..).

Trying out go env lists where it chooses that, so setting CC to gcc-4.8 and CXX to g++-4.8, I then get errors as per:

$ go get github.com/limetext/lime/frontend/termbox
# github.com/limetext/gopy/lib
../src/github.com/limetext/gopy/lib/bool.go:38: cannot use c(obj) (type *C.struct__object) as type *C.PyObject in argument to _Cfunc_boolCheck
../src/github.com/limetext/gopy/lib/code.go:32: cannot use ret (type *C.PyObject) as type *C.struct__object in argument to newCode
../src/github.com/limetext/gopy/lib/code.go:39: cannot use c(obj) (type *C.struct__object) as type *C.PyObject in argument to _Cfunc_codeCheck
../src/github.com/limetext/gopy/lib/code.go:44: cannot use pyCode (type *C.struct__object) as type *C.PyObject in argument to _Cfunc_PyEval_EvalCode
../src/github.com/limetext/gopy/lib/code.go:44: cannot use c(globals) (type *C.struct__object) as type *C.PyObject in argument to _Cfunc_PyEval_EvalCode
../src/github.com/limetext/gopy/lib/code.go:44: cannot use c(locals) (type *C.struct__object) as type *C.PyObject in argument to _Cfunc_PyEval_EvalCode
../src/github.com/limetext/gopy/lib/code.go:45: cannot use ret (type *C.PyObject) as type *C.struct__object in argument to obj2ObjErr

’tis rather frustrating, and I think I can declare Lime “Hard to Install”..
(But also, I’m curious as to how to get around this, still. Maybe a more recent Python 3.3 install.. Maybe a more recent GCC install..).

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