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Why we switched from Python to Go

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Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#171

Post by YawningAngel »

pbreit wrote: post #83
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…

I wonder the opposite. Hardly any system needs to process 500k response per second. But nearly all of them benefit from the developer productivity that Python/Rails offer. My current company has 15 Java & React engineers where 2 or 3 Rails would suffice. Load tops out at maybe a dozen requests/second. Feature development is super-slow. System complexity is off the charts.

I'm sure you'd need 10 or 15 bad Ruby developers as well. I've managed to kick things out the door very happily with one Java and one React developer before.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#172

Post by regecks »

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…

> Sure, as long as you're not using CGO and dynamic linking. Otherwise you'll get the exact same problems as the others.

Not even then, to be honest.

I wrote a product that is deployed on many thousands of servers, and all of a sudden a not-insignificant population just started experiencing SIGABRTs on process start.

Turns out Amazon Linux (and some others) had removed a syscall that i386 Go on Linux was relying on (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/14795). We built our product with a manual patch against "src/runtime/sys_linux_386.s" for many months as a result, and it was really a huge headache to help all our customers.

I would be surprised if Python or even Java broke in this way, for example. I was really surprised it even happened in Go to be honest.

There are other runtime problems too, we had a weird interaction with a "cloud OS" based on cgroups (CloudLinux) screwing up our Go processes depending on how many goroutines we ran ...

I think Go is fantastic but its runtime can definitely clash with its environment ... it's not the same as a C program.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#173

Post by pjmlp »

ubernostrum wrote: post #71
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…

Why does anyone write web apps in Python? PHP? Ruby? First: Because squeezing every last nanosecond's worth of performance out of your web app is actually an extremely rare problem to have. And if you truly cared about performance over programmer convenience, you'd practice what you preach and build your web apps in hand-rolled assembly, but I'd bet a lot of money that you don't do that. The typical web application -…

Java and Go aren't the only programming languages that happen to be comparable to Python and Ruby, while offering good performance.

Common Lisp, Scheme, JavaScript, ML variants come to mind.

Having been part of a startup that used a dynamic language without a world class JIT/AOT compiler (Tcl) back in the first .COM wave, teached me to never do it again.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#174

Post by SeanDav »

wiz21c wrote: post #155
setheron wrote: post #30

How do these shallow articles get upvoted so much ? they don't have much specific information except very generic "developer productivity". Let me give a specific example where moving to Go really helped our tooling: Go has some great interfaces, specifically their net & ssh client. In order to perform operations against some machines, we have to tunnel through bastions, however we'd also like the tool to work when a…

I think the article is not that bad. I specially like the comparison of : well python was a bit faster to develop with, but much longer to optimize. Note they actually used Python long enough to actually spend quite some time to consider the move to go; this means that performance of Python were ranging from good enough to barely enough for a (hopefully) long period of time. Also note the scale of operations of that…

Although, if I spent over 2 weeks developing and optimizing a solution in Language A, I would fully expect to develop and optimize it an awful lot quicker in Language B.

Additionally, a lot of performance issues can depend very much on what libraries are used.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#175

Post by PythonicAlpha »

setheron wrote: post #30

How do these shallow articles get upvoted so much ? they don't have much specific information except very generic "developer productivity". Let me give a specific example where moving to Go really helped our tooling: Go has some great interfaces, specifically their net & ssh client. In order to perform operations against some machines, we have to tunnel through bastions, however we'd also like the tool to work when a…

The reasons in the article might be valid for this particular company, but in my experience, the performance aspect is less valid in 90% of applications.

Either, the database is the limiting factor (and thus, languages like Python are fast enough, anyway) or the really performance demanding parts are located in In my case, I enjoy the productivity that Python gives me and if I encounter such cases, that demand very high performance, I implement them in C or with Cython (or both).

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#178

Post by amelius »

setheron wrote: post #30

How do these shallow articles get upvoted so much ? they don't have much specific information except very generic "developer productivity". Let me give a specific example where moving to Go really helped our tooling: Go has some great interfaces, specifically their net & ssh client. In order to perform operations against some machines, we have to tunnel through bastions, however we'd also like the tool to work when a…

But that is some very specific plumbing, and may not be relevant for 99% of usecases.

If, later in your project, you'd have to add GPU computations to your software, would Go still be a better choice than Python?

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#179

Post by skeletal88 »

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…

Can you point a clueless (about Java web dev) person to a nice, lightweight framework that's easy to learn and to set up? Please no XML configuration files and other such nonsense.

For me as a Python/Rails/C++ dev Java has a reputation of being too large, too complex and otherwise.. unwieldy.

Hearing things like "To test a bug I had to start 6 services on my computer and then I ran out of memory (computer had 16GB)" doesn't encourage me to try to do web dev in Java.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#180

Post by chicago_wade »

BaronVonSteuben wrote: post #123
setheron wrote: post #30

How do these shallow articles get upvoted so much ? they don't have much specific information except very generic "developer productivity". Let me give a specific example where moving to Go really helped our tooling: Go has some great interfaces, specifically their net & ssh client. In order to perform operations against some machines, we have to tunnel through bastions, however we'd also like the tool to work when a…

I think in general people vote up stuff that glorifies their favorite language/smartphone vendor/operating system, even tho many of the comparisons are shallow.

Personally I often upvote based on subjects that I'd like to see more discussion about.

(In this particular case I did not vote on the OP.)

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