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As a card-carrying member of the Rails tribe, this makes excellent sense as an engineering decision for Parse, and broadly makes sense for many "build an API wh

by patio11 11y ago

As a card-carrying member of the Rails tribe, this makes excellent sense as an engineering decision for Parse, and broadly makes sense for many "build an API which serves massive volumes" tasks. We're building a hybrid Rails/Golang app right now and it is, frankly, kicking my butt. Golang really excels at short, composable code, and when you write that you get a very nice deployment story (both in terms of hardware requirements and the actual mechanics of deployment -- compiled code, no dependency management, etc) and blistering speed relative to Ruby/Rails. Rails really excels at writing web apps. If you have never been exposed to writing a web app without a framework before and start trying it with Go, you will gain a new appreciation for how much stuff Rails (and the ecoystem) gets you for free, from session management to sensible dependency management to an ORM which actually works to ... that list, it gets long. Also, and this is just personal comfort and having 50X more Rails experience than Go talking, but for a strings in strings out manipulation like you'll frequently be doing for web applications, I find Ruby more expressive and less painful to write. Literally came up yesterday: https://gist.github.com/patio11/fe0abc1c18d09149e6c9 https://gist.github.com/patio11/fe0abc1c18d09149e6c9

tptacek 11y ago
A difference in idiom between Ruby and Golang: Golang does not want you to overload strings as data structures. Ruby is OK with that. In this case, you're using String#gsub as a setter for the port attribute of a URL masquerading as a string. Idiomatic Golang could would parse the URL out of the string and not touch the string again. You can, of course, do the same thing in Ruby. But Ruby makes the string futzing so easy that it feels natural to switch ports that way. On the other hand, you picked kind of a great example, because Golang's net/url is obtuse in this regard: it exposes the host, but not the port directly (you change the port by appending it to the host). And it provides SplitHostPort --- in case strings.SplitN is too tricky? --- but returns the port as a string, not an integer.

by patio11 11y ago

tptacek 11y ago

A difference in idiom between Ruby and Golang: Golang does not want you to overload strings as data structures. Ruby is OK with that. In this case, you're using String#gsub as a setter for the port attribute of a URL masquerading as a string. Idiomatic Golang could would parse the URL out of the string and not touch the string again. You can, of course, do the same thing in Ruby. But Ruby makes the string futzing so easy that it feels natural to switch ports that way. On the other hand, you picked kind of a great example, because Golang's net/url is obtuse in this regard: it exposes the host, but not the port directly (you change the port by appending it to the host). And it provides SplitHostPort --- in case strings.SplitN is too tricky? --- but returns the port as a string, not an integer.