Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why We Switched from Python to Go (2021)

softwareengineeringdaily.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 301 posts

Re: Why We Switched from Python to Go (2021)

#111

Post by snapetom »

bloblaw wrote: post #97
atx42 wrote: post #52

I think Go and Angular should have died, and would already be footnotes in programming history if they had not been introduced by Google. Let's make procedural programming great again? I get it, you can compile it and it has concurrency, but there's better alternatives in my mind, unfortunately not as popular.

Go is successful because it has many appealing features: 1. trivial cross-compilation 2. native multi-threading (eg no GIL or multi-process hacks) that is easy to take advantage of 3. fast. An order of magnitude faster than Python in many cases. 4. easy to deploy. Most often just a single binary I like Go because once I compile it, I can ship that binary anywhere and it will run. I like Python for a great number of t…

The two things I always bring up in interviews on why I like Go:

1) Easy to use pointers. There's just pointers, not like C where you can have anywhere from 4 to 8 different types depending on your platform. And no, pass by reference vs. value are not the same as pointers.

2) Very simple to use concurrency.

Re: Why We Switched from Python to Go (2021)

#112

Post by bb88 »

oliwarner wrote: post #72
caymanjim wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is a pretty terrible language to work with. Tooling sucks. Dependency conflicts are common. There's no test framework/runner worth a damn. Web frameworks are inferior to those in most other languages. If you're doing data science things, it's hard to beat pandas/numpy. I get that those are popular in that community because the barrier to entry with Python is low. People who are just looking for a tool to solve…

> Web frameworks are inferior to those in most other languages. That's quite a statement. Go on, for most of the other languages, show me a web framework that's better than Django. Python absolutely has deployment challenges, but the performance is Good Enough™ and the speed of modelling and maintaining and accessing databases in Django's ORM is so much better than anything else I've found. Its Admin interface too is…

If you use a DB, the DB will be the slowest aspect of a web framework, or any other kind of IO.

90% of the performance gains I've achieved are by optimizing/reducing large DB queries, or adding an index to the DB.

Re: Why We Switched from Python to Go (2021)

#113

Post by snapetom »

wiz21c wrote: post #110
bloblaw wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is successful because it has many appealing features: 1. trivial cross-compilation 2. native multi-threading (eg no GIL or multi-process hacks) that is easy to take advantage of 3. fast. An order of magnitude faster than Python in many cases. 4. easy to deploy. Most often just a single binary I like Go because once I compile it, I can ship that binary anywhere and it will run. I like Python for a great number of t…

How fast is it compared to rust ? Do you know. I ask because I've started a side project in rust because all of its guarantees were appealing to me (I don't want to spend too much time on bugs, and my code uses some threads). I also need maximum performances. So I've chosen it. But now I have my compilation times that reach 45 seconds, so I'm slowly wondering if the go balance (towards fast compilation) would not be…

As someone who has started side projects with very technical and opinionated friends, just stick with Rust.

Make a decision, stick with it, ship it. If there's a real problem, change it after you have it up and running. There's no point in optimizing for millions of users if you have 0 users now.

Re: Why We Switched from Python to Go (2021)

#114

Post by dgb23 »

kabdib wrote: post #48
papito wrote: post #6

"Developer productivity and not getting too creative" is NOT a point in favor of Go. Go does not have a lot of batteries included. Things like error handling, logging, test bootstrapping, etc, require consensus on the team and tight coordination. Every project is basically its own framework. Most teams are not that well-oiled. They are going to find this out the hard way. And fast? Please. If your database queries ar…

Recent-ish experience: - Wrote a distributed app in Python (it aggregated a few GB / day of info from several thousand servers). Performance was terrible, though I was doing all the right things (async I/O, etc.). - Rewrote it in Go. That worked really well, and took just a few days. But management freaked out, forbade Go in engineering, and so: - Spent several months rewriting the whole thing in C++. What a fucking…

> But management freaked out, forbade Go in engineering

It pains me to read this, especially since Go seems to be a language that is extremely easy to adopt.

Re: Why We Switched from Python to Go (2021)

#115

Post by ptx »

caymanjim wrote: post #55
ranjanprj wrote: post #18

I read somewhere on HackerNews that Python is kinda like a default language and rest such as Go, C, C++, Java are just for Optimization, once you figure out your solution.

Python is a pretty terrible language to work with. Tooling sucks. Dependency conflicts are common. There's no test framework/runner worth a damn. Web frameworks are inferior to those in most other languages. If you're doing data science things, it's hard to beat pandas/numpy. I get that those are popular in that community because the barrier to entry with Python is low. People who are just looking for a tool to solve…

> There's no test framework/runner worth a damn.

The built-in unittest module is essentially a clone of JUnit, so it can't be much worse, and most of the remaining limitations are fixed by pytest which people seem pretty happy with. What test frameworks are you comparing them to?

Re: Why We Switched from Python to Go (2021)

#116

Post by wiz21c »

snapetom wrote: post #113
wiz21c wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How fast is it compared to rust ? Do you know. I ask because I've started a side project in rust because all of its guarantees were appealing to me (I don't want to spend too much time on bugs, and my code uses some threads). I also need maximum performances. So I've chosen it. But now I have my compilation times that reach 45 seconds, so I'm slowly wondering if the go balance (towards fast compilation) would not be…

As someone who has started side projects with very technical and opinionated friends, just stick with Rust. Make a decision, stick with it, ship it. If there's a real problem, change it after you have it up and running. There's no point in optimizing for millions of users if you have 0 users now.

yeah sure, I have zero user and well, it may be like that until my death :-)

that project was an excuse for learning rust. But now I understant rust a bit more, well, I'm a bit scare to wait 45 sec on each build for a side project (ie a project I do on my very limited spare time) :-)

but anyway, rust is really cool to work with (I have a python/C++/assembler/R background). The level of checking it does is really mindblowing (and frustrating at times :-))

Re: Why We Switched from Python to Go (2021)

#117

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jerf wrote: post #23
mellosouls wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#7 given Go can't compare to Python on ecosystem breadth and depth, its a curious choice of "reason to switch"

It's been a while since I wanted something in Go that wasn't available, other than the obvious big-ticket items like NumPy which are ecosystems unto themselves. (Or, to put it another way, yeah, Go doesn't have NumPy, but neither does anybody else other than Python at this point.) YMMV, of course, but it's certainly not a routine occurrence.

If I understand correctly, numpy at least originally was a wrapper around some Fortran libraries. So you could get the same functionality and performance in Fortran.

Am I missing something? Is there some way in which numpy is superior to, say, Linpack (other than not having to use Fortran to call it)?

Is there anything unique about Python that enables this approach? Couldn't Go, say, do the same thing? Or C++?

Re: Why We Switched from Python to Go (2021)

#118

Post by crowdyriver »

Xeoncross wrote: post #70
atx42 wrote: post #52

I think Go and Angular should have died, and would already be footnotes in programming history if they had not been introduced by Google. Let's make procedural programming great again? I get it, you can compile it and it has concurrency, but there's better alternatives in my mind, unfortunately not as popular.

For a lot of people like me, Go was something of a better scripting language. It wasn't as hard to grok as C or Rust, it wasn't as slow as Ruby, Python or PHP. most of all, it it was designed to make use of multiple cores. Surprisingly, having testing and formatting built into the tooling is also a huge win after spending years debating and changing choices in scripting land. Go is the new PHP/Node.js and Rust is the…

My feelings exactly. I love go because of how productive and resilient can be. In months programming in it I've barely had any null pointer exceptions. If it compiles, and passes the linters, it mostly works aswell.

Re: Why We Switched from Python to Go (2021)

#119

Post by josephcsible »

atx42 wrote: post #52

I think Go and Angular should have died, and would already be footnotes in programming history if they had not been introduced by Google. Let's make procedural programming great again? I get it, you can compile it and it has concurrency, but there's better alternatives in my mind, unfortunately not as popular.

Indeed. My overall complaint about Go is that despite being a very new programming language, it hasn't incorporated a lot of lessons learned long ago (e.g., the billion dollar mistake). One of my favorite articles about Go is http://cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/

Re: Why We Switched from Python to Go (2021)

#120

Post by [deleted] »

Xeoncross wrote: post #70
atx42 wrote: post #52

I think Go and Angular should have died, and would already be footnotes in programming history if they had not been introduced by Google. Let's make procedural programming great again? I get it, you can compile it and it has concurrency, but there's better alternatives in my mind, unfortunately not as popular.

For a lot of people like me, Go was something of a better scripting language. It wasn't as hard to grok as C or Rust, it wasn't as slow as Ruby, Python or PHP. most of all, it it was designed to make use of multiple cores. Surprisingly, having testing and formatting built into the tooling is also a huge win after spending years debating and changing choices in scripting land. Go is the new PHP/Node.js and Rust is the…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN