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Why we switched from Python to Go

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Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#51

Post by frozenport »

slackingoff2017 wrote: post #46

Why does anyone write web apps in Python? PHP? Ruby? Modern Java and Go are so much faster than the alternatives that it's stupid to consider anything else if performance is important. Golang and Java can manage over a half million HTTP responses a second. Node is pretty fast but why bother when Java is many times more mature in features, tooling, and and supports concurrency... And uses less ram and is usually faste…

JS lets you share code between front-end and back-end. For example, if you're writing a networked game, you're going to need to transport a lot of state between the server and client.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#52

Post by luord »

slackingoff2017 wrote: post #46

Why does anyone write web apps in Python? PHP? Ruby? Modern Java and Go are so much faster than the alternatives that it's stupid to consider anything else if performance is important. Golang and Java can manage over a half million HTTP responses a second. Node is pretty fast but why bother when Java is many times more mature in features, tooling, and and supports concurrency... And uses less ram and is usually faste…

> Modern Java and Go are so much faster than the alternatives that it's stupid to consider anything else if performance is important.

You answered your own question. Why bother with those languages when the language isn't the bottleneck? In those cases, what language one uses becomes an entirely subjective matter.

> All the big companies are [...]

For every large company using Java, Go, Rust, C, etc. There's another one (hell, probably the same one) also using Python, Ruby, PHP or JS.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#53

Post by smegel »

slackingoff2017 wrote: post #46

Why does anyone write web apps in Python? PHP? Ruby? Modern Java and Go are so much faster than the alternatives that it's stupid to consider anything else if performance is important. Golang and Java can manage over a half million HTTP responses a second. Node is pretty fast but why bother when Java is many times more mature in features, tooling, and and supports concurrency... And uses less ram and is usually faste…

Productivity.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#54

Post by stuartaxelowen »

slackingoff2017 wrote: post #46

Why does anyone write web apps in Python? PHP? Ruby? Modern Java and Go are so much faster than the alternatives that it's stupid to consider anything else if performance is important. Golang and Java can manage over a half million HTTP responses a second. Node is pretty fast but why bother when Java is many times more mature in features, tooling, and and supports concurrency... And uses less ram and is usually faste…

For context, Instagram's primary web servers are Django.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#55

Post by luord »

Oh, terrific, another one.

The only solid reason this article gave was the second one and, really, is the only one that would ever make sense: If the language one's using becomes the bottleneck then, by all means, change it[1].

Everything else is fluff and opinions. Every single other reason is stuff that is entirely subjective and/or python already has and even the article itself acknowledges, at least for one "reason", python as the better option.

Well, at least they tried to be impartial by mentioning the absolutely odious error handling in Go. It's the biggest reason I became so disillusioned with the language once I actually tried it.

[1]: I, however, would try switching CPython for pypy before rewriting the entire architecture from scratch. It's more performant.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#56

Post by hasenj »

I think there's a great value in code being straight forward and simple and that is very much not appreciated among many programmers.

A good language enables you to "compress" your code without making the code flow impossible to follow.

A bad language encourages you to obfuscate the flow of the program using wacky abstraction techniques.

Go doesn't exactly hit the sweet spot for semantic compression due to lack of compile time programming (aka generics?), but it does a good job of making the flow of the program pretty clear.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#57

Post by ChickeNES »

camus2 wrote: post #21
carlisle_ wrote: post #2

> Python, Node and Ruby all have better systems for package management Maybe they have better tools for managing package dependencies but Go doesn't have to deal with interpreter dependencies, which can be a major headache. Go also doesn't have the problem of conflicting system level packages. Honestly no matter how good your deployment practices are, if you have to manage an application's deployment long term you're…

> Go also doesn't have the problem of conflicting system level packages. Sure, as long as you're not using CGO and dynamic linking. Otherwise you'll get the exact same problems as the others. > Go doesn't have to deal with interpreter dependencies As long as Go is forward compatible this will old true, but I don't think this was the point of the comment. 'go get' is a half-baked package manager and yes it fetch packa…

>There is a reason why some gophers are working on an actual package manager...

Finally! I had to deal with a golang project once, the dependency management made me want to pull my hair out after using Bundler and Cargo

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#58

Post by mlevental »

sitkack wrote: post #47

If you can switch from Python to Go, you weren't using Python anyways, you were use Gothon or Javthon. If you want static binaries, great tooling and an excellent imperative and functional language, try F# with mkbundle. The compelling reasons to use go are shrinking.

one problem: windows

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#59

Post by takeda »

btym wrote: post #28
jancsika wrote: post #11

> 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?

Docker takes about 10m to build: https://jenkins.dockerproject.org/job/docker/job/docker.gith... Kubernetes takes about 16m: https://k8s-gubernator.appspot.com/build/kubernetes-jenkins/...

Doesn't sound too fast, that's about how long it takes for FreeBSD kernel to be compiled[1] and I would imagine a kernel is more complex. The whole system takes about 50 minutes[2]

[1] https://ci.freebsd.org/job/FreeBSD-head-amd64-LINT/buildTime...

[2] https://ci.freebsd.org/job/FreeBSD-head-amd64-build/buildTim...

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#60

Post by luord »

dundercoder wrote: post #3

Python 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 also tried Go and didn't feel it was a suitable replacement either. I had never heard of Nim, I'll have to give it a try, thanks.
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