Field manual & progression chart — Go 1.26

Gopher
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Twenty-two learning points, three tiers, and a MIDI/OSC router for your own rig at the end. Nodes unlock when their prerequisites clear, and a node only clears on evidence — a command that runs, a test that passes, a race the detector cannot find.

Toolchain go1.26.6 darwin/arm64
Dependencies zero until node 18, then one
Assessed level JS/TS senior · Go day zero

The 2–3 day project · nodes 16–22

conduit

A MIDI/OSC router you can put in a live set. It replaces pendulum/sender/midi-to-osc.mjs and then goes past it: every controller at once, several destinations at once, a musical clock, a routing table you can rewrite from your phone mid-set, and a panic button that actually stops the sound. You already know this signal flow, so all the difficulty lands on Go rather than on the problem.

What it must do

Read every connected MIDI controller at once
Listen for OSC on UDP 9000 — pendulum's bridge port
Fan out to Max, TouchDesigner and the bridge together
Play MIDI into Ableton over IAC Driver Bus 1
Run a clock the other sources can lock to
Remap a route over HTTP without restarting
Ctrl-C sends all-notes-off before it exits

What it exercises

Goroutine per source — every controller, socket and the clock
One channel as the event bus, select to merge them
RWMutex on the routing table — audio path reads, HTTP writes
Non-blocking send — a wedged destination drops, never stalls
Context cancellation — one Ctrl-C, everything unwinds
cgo, and exactly where the single-binary story stops

Rough shape

// router.go
type Event struct {
	Addr string      // "/midi/cc/74"
	Args []float32
	From string      // "nord", "osc:9000", "clock"
}

type Router struct {
	mu     sync.RWMutex
	routes []Route
	dests  map[string]chan Event
}

func (r *Router) Route(e Event)

Illustrative — you write the bodies

Where the single binary stops The OSC half is stdlib and pure Go: GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build produces a static Linux ELF from your Mac, verified. The MIDI half is not — gomidi's rtmidi driver is a C++ library through cgo, and that same command fails with build constraints exclude all Go files. It compiles and runs natively here in a few seconds against Xcode's clang, and IAC Driver Bus 1 is already enabled, so Ableton needs no setup at all. If you ever want a headless OSC-only node on the performance network, put the MIDI driver behind a build tag. That split is the honest shape of the tradeoff, not a workaround.