4 ms·

What path to this enlightenment would you recommend to one who has cut his teeth and delivered many projects (over many years) in Rails/Django?

kortilla 6y ago
This is a side effect of go’s lack of meta programming to be honest. So much magic that is possible in rails/django/etc is just not possible in golang. This leads to go web frameworks being sort of semi-hard mountainous turds of code generation. You’ll want to stick to stdlib after sifting through them and deciding they aren’t worth it.
- ampdepolymerase 6y ago
  After Django, writing database code manually in Go is not fun at all.
- jchw 6y ago
  Admittedly I liked Django's database layer but using it in Real World production has also left me feeling kind of... eh. Having automigrations and an ORM is fantastic 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time almost ruins the magic entirely. The ORM is not a panacea like SQLAlchemy nearly is. Issues with migrations in production can get surprisingly tricky surprisingly quick. The rest though I do not miss at all. Middleware patching attributes directly into the request object? Python's sad excuse for incremental typing? Ignoring the database bits of Django I struggle to find anything that I don't enjoy doing more in Go. I was a HUGE fan of Django REST Framework and assorted boilerplate for a long time, but I am so extremely glad to be off that ride. Yeah, it lets you do really cool, complex things succinctly and cleverly. The problem is that it lets you do really cool, complex things succinctly and cleverly. The cleverness becomes the enemy. I now have learned to appreciate code that is utterly stupid, obvious, nearly braindead. Every codepath is screaming at you. That is Go in a nutshell. if err != nil { ... } ad nauseam. Sounds terrible... but it kind of isn't. There are some things I would not use Go for. Game development is one of those things. Web servers, though? If you are going to be doing serious work in production environments, Go is absolutely among the best choices. I am still, however, looking forward to trying Rust more and more. My initial impressions with Rocket.rs have been lukewarm. (One thing that is bothersome but not quite a deal breaker is compile times. A lot of crates make the experience bad almost immediately.)
  - alexchamberlain 6y ago
    Using SQLAlchemy has been my biggest (technical) regret in my current project; it was great at first, but overtime it's made testing a lot harder and session/object management has led to subtle bugs.
    - jchw 6y ago
      I feel like it’s a great tool to have available because it has solutions for everything you might want, but I found myself preferring it more for scripting than for application servers. Never quite figured out how to properly handle database sessions, really.
    - danjac 6y ago
      Getting Flask/Pyramid + SQLAlchemy + pytest to play nicely with sessions, transactions and rollbacks has often been the one thing that made me go "screw it" and start over with Django.
    - ywei3410 6y ago
      Speaking from experience, session/object management is always tricky with ORM's. SQLAlchemy has been good for us; but the usage has been very, very disciplined and doesn't look idiomatic.

kortilla 6y ago

This is a side effect of go’s lack of meta programming to be honest. So much magic that is possible in rails/django/etc is just not possible in golang. This leads to go web frameworks being sort of semi-hard mountainous turds of code generation. You’ll want to stick to stdlib after sifting through them and deciding they aren’t worth it.

ampdepolymerase 6y ago
After Django, writing database code manually in Go is not fun at all.
jchw 6y ago
Admittedly I liked Django's database layer but using it in Real World production has also left me feeling kind of... eh. Having automigrations and an ORM is fantastic 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time almost ruins the magic entirely. The ORM is not a panacea like SQLAlchemy nearly is. Issues with migrations in production can get surprisingly tricky surprisingly quick. The rest though I do not miss at all. Middleware patching attributes directly into the request object? Python's sad excuse for incremental typing? Ignoring the database bits of Django I struggle to find anything that I don't enjoy doing more in Go. I was a HUGE fan of Django REST Framework and assorted boilerplate for a long time, but I am so extremely glad to be off that ride. Yeah, it lets you do really cool, complex things succinctly and cleverly. The problem is that it lets you do really cool, complex things succinctly and cleverly. The cleverness becomes the enemy. I now have learned to appreciate code that is utterly stupid, obvious, nearly braindead. Every codepath is screaming at you. That is Go in a nutshell. if err != nil { ... } ad nauseam. Sounds terrible... but it kind of isn't. There are some things I would not use Go for. Game development is one of those things. Web servers, though? If you are going to be doing serious work in production environments, Go is absolutely among the best choices. I am still, however, looking forward to trying Rust more and more. My initial impressions with Rocket.rs have been lukewarm. (One thing that is bothersome but not quite a deal breaker is compile times. A lot of crates make the experience bad almost immediately.)
- alexchamberlain 6y ago
  Using SQLAlchemy has been my biggest (technical) regret in my current project; it was great at first, but overtime it's made testing a lot harder and session/object management has led to subtle bugs.
  - jchw 6y ago
    I feel like it’s a great tool to have available because it has solutions for everything you might want, but I found myself preferring it more for scripting than for application servers. Never quite figured out how to properly handle database sessions, really.
  - danjac 6y ago
    Getting Flask/Pyramid + SQLAlchemy + pytest to play nicely with sessions, transactions and rollbacks has often been the one thing that made me go "screw it" and start over with Django.
  - ywei3410 6y ago
    Speaking from experience, session/object management is always tricky with ORM's. SQLAlchemy has been good for us; but the usage has been very, very disciplined and doesn't look idiomatic.