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Ask HN: What are you using Go for?

22 points by vram22 13y ago

I'm interested in knowing what HNers are doing with Go (other than learning about it, though it would be interesting to hear about learning projects too). Thanks.

charlesdm 13y ago
Not using Go in production, but I've been looking at using it for a mobile API for a stateful system (with both a REST and Websocket interface). Seems to be great for realtime system with a lot of different data inputs.
- vram22 13y ago
  Interesting.
lazyjones 13y ago
After dabbling with it for a couple of weeks, I wrote the backend (search & indexing implementation using the Go standard library's suffix array implementation) of our websites' autocomplete feature. It's been running for 7 months without a crash and without leaking memory, serving several million requests/day. I'd like to use it more, but we have so many layers of legacy Perl code, that it's difficult to replace single components because of their dependencies (rewriting anything worthwhile would mean rewriting 4-5 libraries also).
- vram22 13y ago
  Cool ...
- workhere-io 13y ago
  It's been running for 7 months without a crash and without leaking memory, serving several million requests/day. Sounds cool. What kind of server are you running this on?
  - lazyjones 13y ago
    > What kind of server are you running this on? It runs on a single node of a 4-in-1 supermicro server with dual Opteron 6136 CPUs. Because it uses so little CPU time (about 15% of one core on average), we are now using the server for other things as well ...
bliti 13y ago
As the public entry point towards many internal APIs. Its lighter and faster than any scripting language. Gorilla toolbox made it very easy to write.
- vram22 13y ago
  Interesting use case.
  - bliti 13y ago
    It was to simplify a rather complicated system that used bots. Each bot would report home by requesting different URLs. That seemed overly complicated to me, because one URI change would break every single bot. I then created the public interface and simplified it to one URI. Then the data structure being sent to the APIs got an additional parameter. It told the public interface which API had to get that data. This was a very simple change, because the data structure was defined by the APIs and common among all. It ended up being very fast and allowed the bots to spend less time waiting for a response. Was planning to add a messaging queue but then I left the project (I was a consultant).
    - vram22 13y ago
      >Then the data structure being sent to the APIs got an additional parameter. It told the public interface which API had to get that data. Nice technique.
      - bliti 13y ago
        I call it the "Boarding Pass Pattern." I modeled it after the typical airplane boarding pass where everyone has the same data structure yet is going to different places/doing different things. :)
        vram22 13y ago
        Good name :) Another possible name could be the Differentiator Pattern (heh, just a wild try), since it differentiates between calls which otherwise have the same data. Or even the Call Router pattern, for obvious reasons ...
joewalnes 13y ago
This: https://github.com/joewalnes/websocketd https://github.com/joewalnes/websocketd
- vram22 13y ago
  Just checked the github page for it. Looks interesting and useful. Could be used to push system monitoring data to a browser (among tons of other uses, of course). Trying it out ...
  - vram22 13y ago
    Tried websocketd, getting some issue using it. Emailing you about it offline.
    - vram22 13y ago
      Thanks Joe, solved the problem with your suggestion to use PYTHONUNBUFFERED=true.
  - joewalnes 13y ago
    Here's an example of using it to build a quick Linux system monitoring dashboard: https://github.com/joewalnes/web-vmstats https://github.com/joewalnes/web-vmstats
    - vram22 13y ago
      Thanks, I'm checking that one out.
    - vram22 13y ago
      Wrote something similar but without much GUI, here: http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/01/websocketd-and-python-for-system.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/01/websocketd-and-python-for-... websocketd is a good tool.
dkuntz2 13y ago
A collaborative music jukebox that lets multiple people listen to the stream over a network. Because cloud-based jukeboxes seem to be all the rage, but none of them let you play music with other people at the same time. We gave it a fun name too: https://github.com/turbowookie/turbo-wookie https://github.com/turbowookie/turbo-wookie. Go is used for the HTTP server, and is basically a layer over interacting with MPD. Also working on a flat-file blogging system with an online editor, because flat-file is the middle ground between a static-site generator and a traditional database-based blogging engine.
- vram22 13y ago
  Innovative use of Go, I must say.
  - dkuntz2 13y ago
    It was a school project. We were the only team to use new technologies. Everyone else used Java or C# (with one group using PHP). Go seemed cool. Dart (which we used for the frontend) also seemed cool.
zachlatta 13y ago
I've been using it primarily for a little bit of systems programming and writing internal utilities at work.
- vram22 13y ago
  Utilities seems like a good use of Go, apart from the others I'm aware of. I mean command-line ones.
  - dded 13y ago
    > Utilities seems like a good use of Go Can you elaborate? I'm unfamiliar with Go, but most of my Python (and Perl, sigh) coding could be classified as "utilities for work". I would have thought that any language with an explicit compile step would be at a disadvantage in this space.
    - vram22 13y ago
      >Can you elaborate? Sure. >I would have thought that any language with an explicit compile step would be at a disadvantage in this space. Not exactly, and not always. In fact it can be the opposite. It depends on a few factors, and there are tradeoffs. Consider that so many of the command-line utilities that come bundled with Unixen (Unix, Linux, BSD) are written in C - just look in /bin, /usr/bin, etc (some of the default dirs in $PATH). (Do a "file * | less" in those dirs.) (Though there definitely are utilities that are written purely in *sh, or Perl, or Python, and more so these days than some years ago. Still, some, particularly shell scripts, tend to make calls to compiled utilities such as sed, awk, grep, ls, du, df, ps, and many other commands.) For utilities used often or heavily, or where performance is important, a compiled binary can often be a good choice: lower startup time (don't have to start the interpreter to run the script, often faster run time (because running compiled machine code vs. interpreted or JIT'ed). Go has performance closer to C than Python does, and also has some aspects of HLL's (High Level Languages) like Python. The compile only has to be done once per machine or platform, remember; also, Go compilation is quite fast, which was a design goal of the language. And if you compile once on one machine, you can just copy the binary (in an automated way, too) to any number of other machines running the same OS and version. With a self-sufficient binary, you avoid both the issues of missing or incorrect dynamically loaded libraries of languages like C (if the C program uses them), and the issues of missing or wrong versions of required libraries, with languages like Python. Those are some reasons I could think of, off the top of my head. There may be others, both pro and con.
Wezc 13y ago
Docker is writing in Go (http://www.docker.io/ http://www.docker.io/)
- vram22 13y ago
  Yes, had seen that some days ago, but thanks. I had blogged about Docker using LXC, as part of this post about Domino, a Python PaaS for data science: http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/12/domino-paas-for-data-science.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/12/domino-paas-for-data-scien... and had seen then that Docker uses Go, though I didn't say so in the post. Cool.
wilsonfiifi 13y ago
Bytengine : https://github.com/johnwilson/bytengine https://github.com/johnwilson/bytengine Work in progress but man is Go fun!
- vram22 13y ago
  Had a quick look at Bytengine. Like the idea of using Linux-like file paths to refer to documents. >Files are JSON documents to which you can attach any binary/text data (docx, txt, pdf, jpeg, etc...). I'm guessing you store the filename(s) of the attached data (docx, txt, pdf, ...) in the JSON fragment?
blooberr 13y ago
I work with streaming data and Go has been great reducing the number of backend workers (formerly in Ruby) to handle about 1 TB/day in real time. It's very stable and great for building an internal data aggregator. A friend has also been using Go to create a board game as his side project.
- vram22 13y ago
  Interesting about the data volume. What's used for the GUI of the game?
  - blooberr 13y ago
    HTML 5 canvas.
sergiotapia 13y ago
I'm using it to scrape a popular gaming API endpoint to get info on hundreds of matches per day. I chose Go because it's fast, easily deployable and I enjoy it. :)
- nnash 13y ago
  Dotabuff? Awesome work if its you.

22 points by vram22 13y ago

I'm interested in knowing what HNers are doing with Go (other than learning about it, though it would be interesting to hear about learning projects too). Thanks.

charlesdm 13y ago

Not using Go in production, but I've been looking at using it for a mobile API for a stateful system (with both a REST and Websocket interface). Seems to be great for realtime system with a lot of different data inputs.

vram22 13y ago
Interesting.

lazyjones 13y ago

After dabbling with it for a couple of weeks, I wrote the backend (search & indexing implementation using the Go standard library's suffix array implementation) of our websites' autocomplete feature. It's been running for 7 months without a crash and without leaking memory, serving several million requests/day. I'd like to use it more, but we have so many layers of legacy Perl code, that it's difficult to replace single components because of their dependencies (rewriting anything worthwhile would mean rewriting 4-5 libraries also).

vram22 13y ago
Cool ...
workhere-io 13y ago
It's been running for 7 months without a crash and without leaking memory, serving several million requests/day. Sounds cool. What kind of server are you running this on?
- lazyjones 13y ago
  > What kind of server are you running this on? It runs on a single node of a 4-in-1 supermicro server with dual Opteron 6136 CPUs. Because it uses so little CPU time (about 15% of one core on average), we are now using the server for other things as well ...

bliti 13y ago

As the public entry point towards many internal APIs. Its lighter and faster than any scripting language. Gorilla toolbox made it very easy to write.

vram22 13y ago
Interesting use case.
- bliti 13y ago
  It was to simplify a rather complicated system that used bots. Each bot would report home by requesting different URLs. That seemed overly complicated to me, because one URI change would break every single bot. I then created the public interface and simplified it to one URI. Then the data structure being sent to the APIs got an additional parameter. It told the public interface which API had to get that data. This was a very simple change, because the data structure was defined by the APIs and common among all. It ended up being very fast and allowed the bots to spend less time waiting for a response. Was planning to add a messaging queue but then I left the project (I was a consultant).
  - vram22 13y ago
    >Then the data structure being sent to the APIs got an additional parameter. It told the public interface which API had to get that data. Nice technique.
    - bliti 13y ago
      I call it the "Boarding Pass Pattern." I modeled it after the typical airplane boarding pass where everyone has the same data structure yet is going to different places/doing different things. :)
      - vram22 13y ago
        Good name :) Another possible name could be the Differentiator Pattern (heh, just a wild try), since it differentiates between calls which otherwise have the same data. Or even the Call Router pattern, for obvious reasons ...

joewalnes 13y ago

This: https://github.com/joewalnes/websocketd https://github.com/joewalnes/websocketd

vram22 13y ago
Just checked the github page for it. Looks interesting and useful. Could be used to push system monitoring data to a browser (among tons of other uses, of course). Trying it out ...
- vram22 13y ago
  Tried websocketd, getting some issue using it. Emailing you about it offline.
  - vram22 13y ago
    Thanks Joe, solved the problem with your suggestion to use PYTHONUNBUFFERED=true.
- joewalnes 13y ago
  Here's an example of using it to build a quick Linux system monitoring dashboard: https://github.com/joewalnes/web-vmstats https://github.com/joewalnes/web-vmstats
  - vram22 13y ago
    Thanks, I'm checking that one out.
  - vram22 13y ago
    Wrote something similar but without much GUI, here: http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/01/websocketd-and-python-for-system.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/01/websocketd-and-python-for-... websocketd is a good tool.

dkuntz2 13y ago

A collaborative music jukebox that lets multiple people listen to the stream over a network. Because cloud-based jukeboxes seem to be all the rage, but none of them let you play music with other people at the same time. We gave it a fun name too: https://github.com/turbowookie/turbo-wookie https://github.com/turbowookie/turbo-wookie. Go is used for the HTTP server, and is basically a layer over interacting with MPD. Also working on a flat-file blogging system with an online editor, because flat-file is the middle ground between a static-site generator and a traditional database-based blogging engine.

vram22 13y ago
Innovative use of Go, I must say.
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  It was a school project. We were the only team to use new technologies. Everyone else used Java or C# (with one group using PHP). Go seemed cool. Dart (which we used for the frontend) also seemed cool.

zachlatta 13y ago

I've been using it primarily for a little bit of systems programming and writing internal utilities at work.

vram22 13y ago
Utilities seems like a good use of Go, apart from the others I'm aware of. I mean command-line ones.
- dded 13y ago
  > Utilities seems like a good use of Go Can you elaborate? I'm unfamiliar with Go, but most of my Python (and Perl, sigh) coding could be classified as "utilities for work". I would have thought that any language with an explicit compile step would be at a disadvantage in this space.
  - vram22 13y ago
    >Can you elaborate? Sure. >I would have thought that any language with an explicit compile step would be at a disadvantage in this space. Not exactly, and not always. In fact it can be the opposite. It depends on a few factors, and there are tradeoffs. Consider that so many of the command-line utilities that come bundled with Unixen (Unix, Linux, BSD) are written in C - just look in /bin, /usr/bin, etc (some of the default dirs in $PATH). (Do a "file * | less" in those dirs.) (Though there definitely are utilities that are written purely in *sh, or Perl, or Python, and more so these days than some years ago. Still, some, particularly shell scripts, tend to make calls to compiled utilities such as sed, awk, grep, ls, du, df, ps, and many other commands.) For utilities used often or heavily, or where performance is important, a compiled binary can often be a good choice: lower startup time (don't have to start the interpreter to run the script, often faster run time (because running compiled machine code vs. interpreted or JIT'ed). Go has performance closer to C than Python does, and also has some aspects of HLL's (High Level Languages) like Python. The compile only has to be done once per machine or platform, remember; also, Go compilation is quite fast, which was a design goal of the language. And if you compile once on one machine, you can just copy the binary (in an automated way, too) to any number of other machines running the same OS and version. With a self-sufficient binary, you avoid both the issues of missing or incorrect dynamically loaded libraries of languages like C (if the C program uses them), and the issues of missing or wrong versions of required libraries, with languages like Python. Those are some reasons I could think of, off the top of my head. There may be others, both pro and con.

Wezc 13y ago

Docker is writing in Go (http://www.docker.io/ http://www.docker.io/)

vram22 13y ago
Yes, had seen that some days ago, but thanks. I had blogged about Docker using LXC, as part of this post about Domino, a Python PaaS for data science: http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/12/domino-paas-for-data-science.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/12/domino-paas-for-data-scien... and had seen then that Docker uses Go, though I didn't say so in the post. Cool.

wilsonfiifi 13y ago

Bytengine : https://github.com/johnwilson/bytengine https://github.com/johnwilson/bytengine Work in progress but man is Go fun!

vram22 13y ago
Had a quick look at Bytengine. Like the idea of using Linux-like file paths to refer to documents. >Files are JSON documents to which you can attach any binary/text data (docx, txt, pdf, jpeg, etc...). I'm guessing you store the filename(s) of the attached data (docx, txt, pdf, ...) in the JSON fragment?

blooberr 13y ago

I work with streaming data and Go has been great reducing the number of backend workers (formerly in Ruby) to handle about 1 TB/day in real time. It's very stable and great for building an internal data aggregator. A friend has also been using Go to create a board game as his side project.

vram22 13y ago
Interesting about the data volume. What's used for the GUI of the game?
- blooberr 13y ago
  HTML 5 canvas.

sergiotapia 13y ago

I'm using it to scrape a popular gaming API endpoint to get info on hundreds of matches per day. I chose Go because it's fast, easily deployable and I enjoy it. :)

nnash 13y ago
Dotabuff? Awesome work if its you.