What's new in Goa 25.10
The new release of the Goa SDK, which is aligned with Sculpt OS 25.10, comes with a bunch of new features. Let's have a look!
The new release is made available by Goa's integrated update tool:
$ goa update-goa 25.10
Support for wildcard depot user "_"
With the ongoing transformation of the genode-world repository into a gathering place for Goa projects, we are facing a new use case of shared Goa projects. Originally, Goa required a user to explicitly state the depot user for all dependencies of a project. This becomes impractical when multiple users want to export or publish the same project. In the Genode repository, we addressed this by specifying "_" as a wildcard user in depot recipes. With this release, Goa follows suit and supports the use of "_" as a wildcard depot user.
The introduction of a wildcard depot user additionally enabled us to further streamline the development process with Goa: By default, Goa uses "_" as a depot user and implicitly sets --depot-overwrite for all its commands except for goa publish. From now on, only the latter will require the specification of a real depot user. In consequence, archives exported during development will be placed in <depot-dir>/_/<type>/<name>/<version>.
Moreover, the new Goa also supports wildcard version specifications for depot archives. Goa will use version specifications for archives from depot user "_" as a fallback if there is no version specification available for the actual depot user.
Additional archive-version look-up from depot index
By default, Goa resolves versions of depot archives via the version specifications in goarc files. Additionally, it supports version look-up from a Genode repository, version overrides on the command line, and version detection from version files in project directories.
With the new release, we added support for version look-up from a depot index. This enables Goa users to publish certain archives (e.g. libraries) to be used by other users in their own Goa projects. For this purpose, we extended Goa's support for depot-index projects so that index files not only accept pkg nodes but also api and src nodes.
In the scope of this feature, we added an --archive command-line option to goa archive-versions. With this option, you are able to ask Goa for the versions of particular depot archives, e.g.:
$ goa archive-versions --archive jschlatow/api/lvgl --archive jschlatow/src/lvgl set version(jschlatow/src/lvgl) 2025-10-29 set version(jschlatow/api/lvgl) 2025-10-29
Note that Goa only updates depot index files with a fresh download if provided with the --update-index switch.
New "info" command
The new goa info <archive>' command provides convenient access to the README files of src and pkg archives. Let's have a look at an example that combines the info command with lookup of version info from a user's depot index:
$ goa info jschlatow/pkg/system_info --update-index download jschlatow/index/25.10.xz download jschlatow/index/25.10.xz.sig download jschlatow/pkg/system_info/2025-10-29.tar.xz download jschlatow/pkg/system_info/2025-10-29.tar.xz.sig ...
After downloading the index and the referenced system_info package (including all its dependencies), Goa shows the contained README using man.
Improved Rust and Meson support
Goa relies on a nightly build of the Rust toolchain (see #101). With the new release, Goa automatically installs a known-to-work nightly version of the Rust toolchain using rustup. The toolchain is installed into Goa's install_dir, which defaults to var/install in the project directory. In order to share the local installation between multiple Goa projects, you may add set install_dir <path> to a shared goarc file.
Before 25.10, the Meson support in Goa was restricted to executable-only or library-only projects, although Meson allows building executable and library targets in a single project. In this release, we extended the Meson support by using a two-stage build. Goa now detects what targets a Meson project contains and adapts the linker flags correspondingly.
Integrated performance profiling
The new depot archive genodelabs/api/profile contains a plain profiling library that leverages GCC's -finstrument-functions. Profiling must be enabled for each thread individually as instructed by the README. Once enabled, the data is printed periodically. The output can be parsed by the backtrace utility. You may therefore use goa backtrace as a replacement for goa run.
A usage example for Goa is available at examples/profiling.
Human-oriented configuration format
Sculpt 25.10 comes with optional support for a new human-oriented configuration format referred to as HRD, which stands for "humand-readable data".
In order to kick off the HRD support in Goa, we completely reworked the parsing and generation of configuration files in Goa. More precisely, we eliminated the use of xmllint for XML parsing and replaced it by the new hrd tool. The tool accepts XML as well as HRD as input data, and is able to reformat the data as HRD or XML. We therefore pass generated configuration data through the hrd tool to seamlessly switch between XML and HRD as output format. Goa still uses XML as the default output format. You may switch to HRD output by adding the command-line switch --hrd or by adding set hrd 1 to a goarc file.