Figlet in Go

I’ve just finished porting Figlet to the Go programming language. Figlet is a program originally written in 1991 that prints out large ASCII-art letters from the plain text you provide, e.g:

 ,          _   _
/|   |     | | | |      |
 |___|  _  | | | |  __  |
 |   |\|/  |/  |/  /  \_|
 |   |/|__/|__/|__/\__/ o

As with porting Cowsay to Powershell, I mainly did this so I’d have interesting programs to demo Scoop with. If you’re on Windows and you have Scoop installed, you only need to type “scoop install figlet” and you can start playing around.

I did try getting the full C version to build and run on Windows under MSYS, but only got as far a bunch of gibberish being printed. I was way out of my depth, so I decided to port the C code to Go instead.

There were a couple of benefits to using Go. The first being that I could learn a bit about Go, which I really enjoyed. The second is that it should be cross-platform.