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Why we switched from Python to Go

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Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#371

Post by slackingoff2017 »

matwood wrote: post #258
skeletal88 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)"…

I haven't seen an xml configuration in years beyond some logger configurations. Spring Boot + jOOQ is simple to setup and works. It is my go-to for backend services. You will have to be okay with dependency injection which for some reason people have problems with. It's important to remember that Java has been around for 20-30 years and it certainly has not stood still. Many of the complaints people have are from Jav…

>It's important to remember that Java has been around for 20-30 years and it certainly has not stood still. Many of the complaints people have are from Java of 10+ years ago.

Exactly. I spent about 5 years away from Java after J2EE made me swear it off. I learned a bunch of other languages and frameworks and recently went back. Java is awesome now. Unlike 5 years ago is relatively easy to avoid all the clunky old crap if you want to.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#372

Post by slackingoff2017 »

tychver wrote: post #251
hasenj wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we've seen for example, Twitter do that. I saw some slides[0] that other day from sometime in 2007[1] where they said they were using Ruby and spawning 180 rails instances to handle 600 requests per second. Like, that's insane. A compiled language can handle that load with just one instance. It's nothing. [0]: https://www.slideshare.net/Blaine/scaling-twitter/3-First_So... Also, if your audience is small enough…

Twitter's issue was more with concurrent IO than anything. This problem was solved about 10 years ago with the release of Ruby 1.9 and since then only one Ruby process per core is required, just like NodeJS. In that time most CPU intensive parts of the web stack have also been re-written as native extensions. Recent benchmarks of a properly setup Ruby environment vs Go/Gin are showing Ruby/Sinatra as having 50% of th…

Twitter has moved key parts of the system to Java. The search functionality was redone on top of Netty which they had some articles about.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#373

Post by StavrosK »

steveklabnik wrote: post #319
StavrosK wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Django's ecosystem has spoilt me so much that it's very hard to switch to another language, at least as far as web apps are concerned. I would love to play with Rust/Nim more, but most of the side-projects I'm passionate about involve at least a few things that Python has a lib for that would be a huge time sink to rewrite in another language.

What libraries are you most missing for Rust?

These days I mostly do web, so Django and the whole ecosystem are just missing from Rust, but I'd settle for just the ORM. I found Diesel pretty hard to get started with, unfortunately :/

My other hobby is microcontrollers, and I would love it if I could run Rust on my ESP8266. I can already run MicroPython, but it feels a bit hacky (probably unfairly), and it would be amazing if I could use Rust and easily link in all the C/C++ libraries the Arduino framework has available.

I know this reply isn't useful (I miss all the libraries, woo), but it's as specific as I can get. I started a very simple website uptime monitoring service:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/panoptes

I didn't get very far before the difficulty of integrating Diesel just stalled the whole thing.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#374

Post by slackingoff2017 »

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 -…

Bottleneck at the DB/network is BS. Cheap AWS boxes have 200Mbps of throughout and you'll basically never get that out of any of the slower languages on a box with something like 1VCPU 1GB ram. Slightly more expensive boxes have 1 gigabit which is hitting many thousands of HTTP requests per second, even Java/Go struggle with that load.

I have seen MS SQL server handle over 10k database queries per second on a regular machine in a real, huge application (over a million lines). Can Python handle 10k queries per second? Definitely not. In Java or go that load could probably be handled by a single AWS box that costs $10 a month.

I have never seen a database maxed out that wasn't stuck because of table locks. I've seen applications like WordPress die at 10, requests a second

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#375

Post by tschellenbach »

VintageCool wrote: post #348
tschellenbach wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually moving to Go was a very thorough and long process. We did small example projects and tried out many of the libraries we needed. The blogpost is more of a high level summary of why Go is such a great language.

Did the Go implementation of the ranked feed use the algorithm optimizations discovered while optimizing the Python implementation?

No most of the optimization were Python specific. But of course development time was a bit faster due to it being the 2nd time solving the same problem.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#376

Post by luord »

slackingoff2017 wrote: post #365
luord wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I have no interest in getting into a religious flamewar. I will only say that I find it weird that you think that there aren't endless hacks and VMs in [insert here the languages you like].

Eh, vanilla Java or Go is at least an order of magnitude faster than those other languages without messing with anything. You can mess around with the JVM and interfacing to native code but it's rarely needed because it's already within a low multiple of C performance writing things normally. Arguments about what language is better are pretty flamey but it's hard to argue that performance is not an advantage of Go/Ja…

> it's hard to argue that performance is not an advantage of Go/Java

And I never even remotely argued such a thing so I'm confused as to why you are saying this in reply to me.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#377

Post by steveklabnik »

StavrosK wrote: post #373
steveklabnik wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What libraries are you most missing for Rust?

These days I mostly do web, so Django and the whole ecosystem are just missing from Rust, but I'd settle for just the ORM. I found Diesel pretty hard to get started with, unfortunately :/ My other hobby is microcontrollers, and I would love it if I could run Rust on my ESP8266. I can already run MicroPython, but it feels a bit hacky (probably unfairly), and it would be amazing if I could use Rust and easily link in a…

Yeah, Diesel is tough; they're working on better docs which should help out quite a bit.

IIRC someone is working on the ESP stuff...

> I know this reply isn't useful

Naw, it's all good: it's just as much about qualitative as quantitative. It's also because I'm writing a small framework in Rust in my spare time, so "rust for web" stuff is extremely top of mind for me. Thanks for taking the time :)

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#378

Post by maheart »

slackingoff2017 wrote: post #374
ubernostrum wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

Bottleneck at the DB/network is BS. Cheap AWS boxes have 200Mbps of throughout and you'll basically never get that out of any of the slower languages on a box with something like 1VCPU 1GB ram. Slightly more expensive boxes have 1 gigabit which is hitting many thousands of HTTP requests per second, even Java/Go struggle with that load. I have seen MS SQL server handle over 10k database queries per second on a regular…

There's more to bottlenecks than throughput. Latency also needs to be considered. A 5MB webpage will load much faster when served from a 100Mbit connection with 10ms of latency, than a 1000Mbit connection with 300ms of latency. Especially when you consider that web page requests (pre-HTTP/2) consisted of many separate requests to fetch all the different assets (e.g. CSS, JS, images, etc).

Secondly, the majority of websites that make up the Internet (and Intranets) are not serving 10k/second. They're serving a 100th of that.

Third, because your database can handle 10k queries, and your database can aggregate and manipulate data, and it's optimised to do this -- it might be a good idea to perform these functions at the DB-level, as opposed to the web application.

Finally, as stated previously, for most businesses, it's easier to buy more beefy servers, or get a more experienced PHP dev (that understands how to optimise code) than it is to find a Go programmer.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#379

Post by hasenj »

dozzie wrote: post #232
jon_richards wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a number of reasons, I haven't bothered to do a complex build/deploy process. I write in python, I freeze the requirements into requirements.txt, and I type "eb deploy". Anything else is overkill for me.

And then you have different lists of installed packages in your development environment and in the production and even between two different production servers (which can silently and/or subtly break your software), and you need to manually install all the C/C++ libraries and compilers and non-Python tools and whatnot, and the upgrade process takes a lot of time and can break on problems with PyPI and/or packages tha…

Python does not really have a "build" step. _That_ is the problem.

I think Heroku also played a role in prolifirating the idea that you can just push your code (from a git repo) to a server, and the server will take care of deploying it. Which usually means the server will install all the dependencies from pip during the process.

Re: Why we switched from Python to Go

#380

Post by le_frogballs »

it wrote: post #91

I'm surprised to see Go's error handling listed as a disadvantage. Go encourages writing good error messages, and that's one of my favorite things about the language. To get a sense of it, take a look at a failing test in a language such as Python that uses asserts for testing and compare it to the equivalent written in Go. Quite often, the error message in Go will be clear and to the point. On the other hand, I've s…

how brain-damaged are you that you can spin something that is so evidently completely broken in Go and say that not only is it not broken, but that its actually an advantage. Holy shit. Keep your repulsive error handling semantics confined to your Neanderthalean language, and please for god's sake, never design a language
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