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I love Go. It has become the default Go-To (pun intended) language for me for almost anything that needs to be small and portable. However, I don't see myself

I love Go. It has become the default Go-To (pun intended) language for me for almost anything that needs to be small and portable. However, I don't see myself writing a full server with it, I would still prefer a dynamic language like Ruby/Python for that and use Go for micro-services CLIs and the rest. For example: Our main application is Rails, it communicates with SOLR as the search index, in between the application and SOLR there's a proxy server that backups the documents onto S3 and also does Round-Robin between slaves. One other thing is that we use Go to communicate with all external APIs of 3rd parties, the application code is rails and it communicates transparently with a Go server that fetches the data from 3rd parties and responds to the main application.

asimuvPR 10y ago
Likewise. I use for set and forget services. Once a Go application has been properly tested it runs quietly like a mainframe in the corner of a datacenter.
- iagooar 10y ago
  Same experience here. Writing tiny, focused, small footprint services with Go has been a blast. It really has its niche. Especially since learning to write (and read) Go is a matter of hours, more than days (or even weeks).
  - aksx 10y ago
    I have been running multiple programs on my DO vps, my uptime is 305 days. 1 program was updated in Feb to accommodate an API change another was updated in Dec 2014. It's amazing how good they perform with minimal memory usage.
avitzurel 10y ago
Also to add on this... All of my lambda functions are a thin Node wrapper on top of Go applications. The go application is simply a command line accepting JSON via stdin (from the Node wrapper). It is a Joy to test, you can run it locally/independently etc... [Edit]: Typos fix
- ketralnis 10y ago
  Do you use a library or toolkit for this? Or is there an example of this that you can point me to? This sounds useful with or without Go
  - avitzurel 10y ago
    Let me open source something real quick. Wouldn't call it a toolkit but might be useful for some people.
  - avitzurel 10y ago
    Quickly open sourced as promised: https://github.com/KensoDev/sns-lambda-notifier-golang https://github.com/KensoDev/sns-lambda-notifier-golang It's simple enough to understand with absolutely no documentation. But here's the gist. You develop in Go, you can run tests or run it independent from the lambda and then, when you want to deploy you run `release.sh`. This is perfect for web callbacks, SNS notifications etc...
  - dcu 10y ago
    https://apex.sh https://apex.sh is nice
kingnothing 10y ago
Given the low API limits on most services, what was the reason you went with Go for those integrations as opposed to ruby / rails?
- avitzurel 10y ago
  I wrote a bit more in length about it here: http://www.avitzurel.com/blog/2015/06/13/scaling-gogobot-using-3rd-party-apis/ http://www.avitzurel.com/blog/2015/06/13/scaling-gogobot-usi... In this blog post the previous solution is presented using Nginx, now it's Golang similar to Templar (mentioned in the post).
spriggan3 10y ago
Go type rigidity makes Go code tedious to write. Instead of thinking "How can we solve that problem" developers writing Go end up thinking "How can we make the problem fit Go type system". I'm not even talking about concurrency here, I'm talking about Types. Saying otherwise would be dishonest, unless one has never used anything but C... Anybody who doesn't believe me just has to look the reflect package. Reflection packages are usually a good indication of language capabilities when it comes to statically typed ones. It doesn't make Go a bad language,it has a some good percs, it's just frustrating that its authors conflated simplicity with rigidity. Also I hate when languages have hidden APIs, i.e. things the language can do that the programmer can't. Go is full of these (for instance append which is a parametric function since it knows the proper return type no matter what type of slice you pass it, but you can't write your own? ). It's good think that it requires very little investment to get started, but it becomes highly frustrating when one stumbles on its limitations.
- eternalban 10y ago
  All languages require investment. Zero sum game, with some opting for syntactic simplicity that entails a long term investment of "idioms", subtle semantics, post-processing, etc., and others present a high initial investment and subsequent clarity, regularity, and possibly robustness. C/Go/Java/C# are in the former category. Scala, Haskell, Rust, for the latter. (C++ uniquely bites you at both ends :)
  - beders 10y ago
    It is not a Zero sum game. The moment you actually need to maintain a large codebase for years, strongly typed languages are much more cost-efficient. Finding out, with absolute certainty, which code calls which code under which circumstances is a life-saver. Any modern IDE for JVM languages accomplishes that. It's not enough for your code to be readable. It needs to be statically traceable.
    - AlisdairO 10y ago
      > absolute certainty I completely agree with your overall point, but typically reflection will inhibit truly 'absolute' certainty.

asimuvPR 10y ago

Likewise. I use for set and forget services. Once a Go application has been properly tested it runs quietly like a mainframe in the corner of a datacenter.

iagooar 10y ago
Same experience here. Writing tiny, focused, small footprint services with Go has been a blast. It really has its niche. Especially since learning to write (and read) Go is a matter of hours, more than days (or even weeks).
- aksx 10y ago
  I have been running multiple programs on my DO vps, my uptime is 305 days. 1 program was updated in Feb to accommodate an API change another was updated in Dec 2014. It's amazing how good they perform with minimal memory usage.

avitzurel 10y ago

Also to add on this... All of my lambda functions are a thin Node wrapper on top of Go applications. The go application is simply a command line accepting JSON via stdin (from the Node wrapper). It is a Joy to test, you can run it locally/independently etc... [Edit]: Typos fix

ketralnis 10y ago
Do you use a library or toolkit for this? Or is there an example of this that you can point me to? This sounds useful with or without Go
- avitzurel 10y ago
  Let me open source something real quick. Wouldn't call it a toolkit but might be useful for some people.
- avitzurel 10y ago
  Quickly open sourced as promised: https://github.com/KensoDev/sns-lambda-notifier-golang https://github.com/KensoDev/sns-lambda-notifier-golang It's simple enough to understand with absolutely no documentation. But here's the gist. You develop in Go, you can run tests or run it independent from the lambda and then, when you want to deploy you run `release.sh`. This is perfect for web callbacks, SNS notifications etc...
- dcu 10y ago
  https://apex.sh https://apex.sh is nice

kingnothing 10y ago

Given the low API limits on most services, what was the reason you went with Go for those integrations as opposed to ruby / rails?

avitzurel 10y ago
I wrote a bit more in length about it here: http://www.avitzurel.com/blog/2015/06/13/scaling-gogobot-using-3rd-party-apis/ http://www.avitzurel.com/blog/2015/06/13/scaling-gogobot-usi... In this blog post the previous solution is presented using Nginx, now it's Golang similar to Templar (mentioned in the post).

spriggan3 10y ago

Go type rigidity makes Go code tedious to write. Instead of thinking "How can we solve that problem" developers writing Go end up thinking "How can we make the problem fit Go type system". I'm not even talking about concurrency here, I'm talking about Types. Saying otherwise would be dishonest, unless one has never used anything but C... Anybody who doesn't believe me just has to look the reflect package. Reflection packages are usually a good indication of language capabilities when it comes to statically typed ones. It doesn't make Go a bad language,it has a some good percs, it's just frustrating that its authors conflated simplicity with rigidity. Also I hate when languages have hidden APIs, i.e. things the language can do that the programmer can't. Go is full of these (for instance append which is a parametric function since it knows the proper return type no matter what type of slice you pass it, but you can't write your own? ). It's good think that it requires very little investment to get started, but it becomes highly frustrating when one stumbles on its limitations.

eternalban 10y ago
All languages require investment. Zero sum game, with some opting for syntactic simplicity that entails a long term investment of "idioms", subtle semantics, post-processing, etc., and others present a high initial investment and subsequent clarity, regularity, and possibly robustness. C/Go/Java/C# are in the former category. Scala, Haskell, Rust, for the latter. (C++ uniquely bites you at both ends :)
- beders 10y ago
  It is not a Zero sum game. The moment you actually need to maintain a large codebase for years, strongly typed languages are much more cost-efficient. Finding out, with absolute certainty, which code calls which code under which circumstances is a life-saver. Any modern IDE for JVM languages accomplishes that. It's not enough for your code to be readable. It needs to be statically traceable.
  - AlisdairO 10y ago
    > absolute certainty I completely agree with your overall point, but typically reflection will inhibit truly 'absolute' certainty.