> Our largest micro service written in Go currently takes 6 seconds to compile.
What's the biggest, beefiest real world program yet written in Go, and how long does it take to compile it?
Why we switched from Python to Go
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Re: Why we switched from Python to Go
#12>Reason 3 – Developer Productivity & Not Getting Too Creative There is a time and place for these tools. A part of managing a team is ensuring there are good practices around "getting creative" and that there is a clear rationale. Python's metaprogramming came in handy for helping us provide a high level syntax to work with our data model.
It's not just metaprogramming, it's a lack of standard types (like sets) paired with a lack of parametric polymorphism cough yeah, generics cough that makes writing some data structure manipulations feel sort of counter-productive.
Go makes up for this by making other stuff being easy and fast to code.
Re: Why we switched from Python to Go
#13>Reason 3 – Developer Productivity & Not Getting Too Creative There is a time and place for these tools. A part of managing a team is ensuring there are good practices around "getting creative" and that there is a clear rationale. Python's metaprogramming came in handy for helping us provide a high level syntax to work with our data model.
I'm happy that Python's metaprogramming came in handy for you and your team, but Python's propensity for DSLs is one of the reasons I loathe it so much. I guess in the context of data science, a DSL makes sense, but it's a nightmare to debug.
Re: Why we switched from Python to Go
#14Thank you for the insights on Go and how Go has added value to your
organizations and enabled a better environment for development at your
organization! I love hearing viewpoints on tradeoffs and general evaluations on
value of new(ish) development technologies.
I'd also like to point out that I write this a Python-phile that has come to the understanding that Python is great until it isn't. When Python becomes to burdensome, the understanding of the problem delivered by my Python sketch helps to narrow the focus of what I need to solve the problem efficiently. By that time, Go has never been the correct tool for me. I'm comfortable writing solutions in C, Rust and Java, perhaps this is my problem.
Whenever I read or write Go I don't understand how it managed to capture the mindshare that is has. Especially in the face of other technologies available, Go seems like a timid step forward in descriptions of computation, when there are bolder choices that deliver valuable additions to my development ecosystem.
I appreciate that Go places a premium price on simplicity, however with languages like Rust make some big steps towards static guarantees at compile time the guarantees that Go makes seem pretty weak. But I feel that when I make the leap from Python to Go, I admittedly don't understand the allure. Static compiltion is really nice! Statically linked binaries for distribution is very nice! The tooling is out of this world! Hands down, Go has one of the best out of the box toolchains I've ever encountered. But when helping me think about computation, Go doesn't.
Go's concurrency primitives don't feel like a great deal of a step forward compared to C. I know, I know, this is crazy talk. I feel like I am missing some great wisdom about Go, I truly do. Concurrency is really hard and Go has clearly helped a lot of people minimize concurrency problems. But whenever I use channels I am reminded Go does not allow me to shut my brain off, and whenever the deadlock bug strikes, I feel that I might as well be writing C.
I don't mean to disrespect Go and the great things it does, the opposite of that! I am hoping Go delivers a bulletproof abstraction for concurrency. Until then I've become too familiar with other tools to justify using Go for more than incredibly niche use cases. I really hope that will change (both my mindset and Go)!
Re: Why we switched from Python to Go
#15You had me at 4. I'm definitely GOing to give this language a GO now. That was a GOod introduction to the language, a veritable advertisement, if you will.
Re: Why we switched from Python to Go
#16Python was my entry into the programming world, and I've been an evangelist ever since... Or I was until I ran into distribution and parallelism. Since then, Nim has been my go-to language of choice. It is all that Python was, plus unbelievable speed, compiling to shippable binaries, and some other cool language features that admittedly, are still beyond my scope of abilities. Still quite lacking in libraries compare…
I never heard of Nim, something to try out at some point. What's your favorite Nim tutorial?
Re: Why we switched from Python to Go
#17Python was my entry into the programming world, and I've been an evangelist ever since... Or I was until I ran into distribution and parallelism. Since then, Nim has been my go-to language of choice. It is all that Python was, plus unbelievable speed, compiling to shippable binaries, and some other cool language features that admittedly, are still beyond my scope of abilities. Still quite lacking in libraries compare…
Can you elaborate, somewhat? How long ago did you try GO? Also, I agree, having a generous assortment of contributed libraries makes all the difference.
Re: Why we switched from Python to Go
#18> Our largest micro service written in Go currently takes 6 seconds to compile. What's the biggest, beefiest real world program yet written in Go, and how long does it take to compile it?
Two large projects that I know of are CockroachDB and Influxdb
A quick glance seems to indicate that cockroachdb takes about 9 minutes [1] and infuxdb about 15 minutes [2]
[1] https://teamcity.cockroachdb.com/viewLog.html?buildId=380603...
Re: Why we switched from Python to Go
#19I would agree with some of the points - speed (which is stretched over two points), concurrency, and the ability not to do magic as easily, but several of the points (compile time, available developers, strong ecosystem) are not a "versus Python" at all but rather against other languages. Personally, I see a language like Go and Python as solving different spaces. I wouldn't write a lot of website business logic in G…
Yeah there are some use cases where Python is a clear winner. For us Python seemed like a good fit initially. Traffic was low and the API didn't provide more advanced features where Python's speed becomes an issue. (Ranking, aggregation)
Re: Why we switched from Python to Go
#20Author here. Super cool to see this post on HNews.
For those of you working with Go. One of the guys on our team wrote a little tool called VirtualGo. It's pretty handy when you're working on multiple go based projects (https://github.com/getstream/vg)