golang experimentation at runtime

Often when I'm coding I like to see how things work or what certain expressions yield at a specific area in my code base.

Most other languages provide tools to evaluate new custom expressions at runtime. Golang doesn't seem to provide this yet, or at least with the tools I've used (sublime, goclipse).

Currently I'm solving this by using Println or recreating a small test environment that sets up just what I need to run some on the fly expressions, but I'm figuring there must be a better way...

I could use something like play.golang.org, but often I have a lot of dependencies or it would require a lot of copy and pasting to make my simple trial-and-error code work.

Have you already tried https://github.com/motemen/gore project?

Most probably you are looking for a debugger (to insert breakpoints, stop at them and start playing with variables there).

One of the debuggers is https://github.com/mailgun/godebug and you can read more how to use it in this blogpost.

Sublime and VIM now support the go plugin but the usage is a little esoteric.

The JetBrains IdeaJ community IDE with the go debug plugin has worked really, really well for me. That said, starting out, the value of a quick go run with fmt.Println can't be overstated.