dingo-developer

Dingo Developer

Overview

Dingo is a meta-language for Go that transpiles .dingo files to idiomatic .go files. It provides modern language features — Result/Option types, sum types (enums), pattern matching, error propagation, safe navigation, null coalescing, lambdas, generics, and tuples — while maintaining 100% Go ecosystem compatibility.

Repository: https://github.com/MadAppGang/dingo

Key philosophy: Dingo is syntax sugar over Go, not a new type system. The transpiled Go code is clean and idiomatic. All Go syntax remains valid in .dingo files.

When to use Dingo:

• You want concise error handling with the ? operator
• You need sum types (enums) and pattern matching
• You prefer functional patterns with lambdas
• You want Option[T] and Result[T, E] types
• You need safe navigation (?.) and null coalescing (??)

CLI commands:

dingo build ./cmd/app  # Transpile + compile; explicit packages only, not ./...
dingo run main.dingo   # Transpile + run directly
dingo go ./...         # Generate .go files only, into build/ (no go.mod there)

Build directory, checking a project, CI, editor setup and transpile errors: references/build-and-tooling.md (relative to this file).

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Error Handling

The ? Operator — Three Variants

Decision tree — pick the first that applies:

1. Just propagate the error unchanged → plain ?
2. Add lightweight string context → ? "message"
3. Build a custom error type or capture variables → ? |e| expr
4. Need side effects or multi-statement logic → guard (see below)
5. Absence is expected, not an error → use Option[T] + guard

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Variant 1: Plain Propagation

// BEFORE (Go)
user, err := getUser(id)
if err != nil {
    return nil, err
}

// AFTER (Dingo)
user := getUser(id)?

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Variant 2: String Context

Generates fmt.Errorf("message: %w", err).

// BEFORE (Go)
config, err := loadConfig(path)
if err != nil {
    return nil, fmt.Errorf("load config: %w", err)
}