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> This is exactly how I felt moving from a Python codebase to Go. But you realize on the 100th or so Python stacktrace that it's worth the investment up front,

> This is exactly how I felt moving from a Python codebase to Go. But you realize on the 100th or so Python stacktrace that it's worth the investment up front, if not for type safety alone. Yep. Maybe I just suck at programming but I couldn't write enough tests to avoid not being fed up debugging stack traces in production. I started using Python's type hints, since this was the source of most of the bugs which helped but I'd rather just use a strongly typed language next time. > Careful with that assumption. A pure Go application will in many cases be more performant than a pure Python one, but Python has a better C interop story. In the particular cases of parsing XML and JSON, I'd wager Python is much faster, actually. I've got a few million records pulled from an API so I'm extremely I/O bound and goroutines are easier to work with than Python concurrency. I've also got reasonably complex data processing beyond just XML/JSON parsing. I think on the whole Go is still going to be faster, but thanks for the heads up.

timothycrosley 7y ago
Have you tried async? I find it much easier personally to reason about and debug than channels, and is perfect for IO-bound problems. If you really like channels, note that Python 3.9 will have sub-interpreters and channels as well: https://hackernoon.com/has-the-python-gil-been-slain-9440d28fa93d https://hackernoon.com/has-the-python-gil-been-slain-9440d28...
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Unfortunately I deploy on App Engine which is still at Python 3.7.
- weberc2 7y ago
  Goroutines are quite a lot nicer than async for a few reasons. Firstly, there are no “forgot to await” errors, secondly there is no need to worry about some library making a sync call way down the call stack and therefore blocking your event loop, and thirdly goroutines can use all cores on a CPU to parallelize CPU intensive tasks, which means you don’t block the event loop unless you really are out of CPU. Blocking the event loop is a really big deal since it can cause health checks to fail which can cascale onto other instances and bring your app down. We’ve experienced this with both CPU- and IO-bound event loop blockages, and they’re really hard to debug. These just aren’t issues that happen in Go.
  - timothycrosley 7y ago
    A lot of what you describe is for CPU bound problems, most of the problems I face personally and the the problem, in particular, the parent mentioned are IO-bound. Async in Python is a near-perfect fit for this kind of problem space and is really easy to reason about and debug as you can step through and debug one line of execution at a time.
    - weberc2 7y ago
      Only one of those problems is CPU. The others are type system and IO issues, and they happen in IO bound services too.

timothycrosley 7y ago

Have you tried async? I find it much easier personally to reason about and debug than channels, and is perfect for IO-bound problems. If you really like channels, note that Python 3.9 will have sub-interpreters and channels as well: https://hackernoon.com/has-the-python-gil-been-slain-9440d28fa93d https://hackernoon.com/has-the-python-gil-been-slain-9440d28...

cameronbrown 7y ago
Unfortunately I deploy on App Engine which is still at Python 3.7.
weberc2 7y ago
Goroutines are quite a lot nicer than async for a few reasons. Firstly, there are no “forgot to await” errors, secondly there is no need to worry about some library making a sync call way down the call stack and therefore blocking your event loop, and thirdly goroutines can use all cores on a CPU to parallelize CPU intensive tasks, which means you don’t block the event loop unless you really are out of CPU. Blocking the event loop is a really big deal since it can cause health checks to fail which can cascale onto other instances and bring your app down. We’ve experienced this with both CPU- and IO-bound event loop blockages, and they’re really hard to debug. These just aren’t issues that happen in Go.
- timothycrosley 7y ago
  A lot of what you describe is for CPU bound problems, most of the problems I face personally and the the problem, in particular, the parent mentioned are IO-bound. Async in Python is a near-perfect fit for this kind of problem space and is really easy to reason about and debug as you can step through and debug one line of execution at a time.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    Only one of those problems is CPU. The others are type system and IO issues, and they happen in IO bound services too.