raw

== Disclaimer ==
The RAW package circumvents and subverts Go's type system. As such it should be used with extreme caution and only
when absolutely necessary. Incautious use can and will lead to memory corruption. As such no warranty can be provided
as to its suitability or fitness for purpose.

Just to reiterate: MISUSE WILL RESULT IN MEMORY CORRUPTION.


== License ==

RAW is dual-licensed.

The library can be included in your project as "Random Access Woe" under the BSD-derived license in LICENSE.

"Read it And Weep" is the closed-source variant of the library. It is in all particulars identical to the open-source
version but requires a commercial usage license and in the process hides your shame for abusing Go in this manner.
Further details of commercial license costs are available from the author on request.


== About ==

RAW is a high-level interface to Go's unsafe and reflection packages, designed to ease both generic programming and
low-level memory access.

RAW allows any type with identifiable contiguous memory allocation to be converted to a byte slice which can then
be manipulated using many of the standard IO interfaces provided by the core library. This is very unsafe but for
certain system programming tasks can be very useful. In particular it facilitates the sharing of memory buffers with
language runtimes and any number of related tricks such as polymorphic variables, mixed-content arrays and binary
data marshalling.

Documentation is currently sparse but will improve over time. I have tried to keep nomenclature clear to assist with
figuring our how the library should be used and there are also extensive tests which demonstrate all of the library
types and their methods in use.


== History ==

The RAW package began life as a research spike of the GoLightly virtual machine project and was originally to be called
either "Dangerous" or "Deadly" to reflect the unpleasant consequences of misuse. A friend suggested "Random Access Woe"
and the name stuck.