Rewriting a large production system in Go • Hacker News Board

Re: Rewriting a large production system in Go

#11

Post by lbarrow » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 1:03 AM UTC

It's interesting to see that more and more internal projects at Google are getting redone in Go. However, this sentence stands out to me in the article:

"Before doing the rewrite, we realized we needed only a small subset of the functionality of the original system -- perhaps 20% (or less) of what the other projects were doing with it."

I'm guessing that a lot of the benefit of the rewrite came simply from the simplification of the core logic and dropping extraneous functionality. That said, having written a little bit of both C++ and Go, I can completely see why the author found that Go was both far more readable and more maintainable than C++.

Re: Rewriting a large production system in Go

#12

Post by jlgreco » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 1:03 AM UTC

pekk wrote: post #9

derefr wrote: post #6

You know, every time I see some Googler shocked at the effectiveness and various advantages of coding in Go, I wonder why Google never adopted Erlang. They could have been getting all these same advantages (and then some) a decade ago :)

Are Go and Erlang that fungible with each other? Honest question.

Not particularly. They are basically just both languages that were inspired by CSP; the similarities don't go much deeper.

Re: Rewriting a large production system in Go

#13

Post by lbarrow » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 1:05 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #6

You know, every time I see some Googler shocked at the effectiveness and various advantages of coding in Go, I wonder why Google never adopted Erlang. They could have been getting all these same advantages (and then some) a decade ago :)

One of the big projects they're working on in the next version of Go is to make the internal scheduler more Erlang-esque =)

Re: Rewriting a large production system in Go

#14

Post by codezero » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 1:07 AM UTC

pvdm wrote: post #4

Unless it is open sourced, I can't validate the claims.

If you have the time, rewrite one of your own services in Go, open source it, and share the post here on Hacker News.

Re: Rewriting a large production system in Go

#15

Post by kailuowang » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 1:08 AM UTC

It disheartens me a bit when people compare Go with C++. It gave me the impression that Go was created to be better C++ (or Java) mostly to make life easier for the thousands of developers at Google who are stuck with those two languages.

Re: Rewriting a large production system in Go

#16

Post by lbarrow » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 1:10 AM UTC

kailuowang wrote: post #15

It disheartens me a bit when people compare Go with C++. It gave me the impression that Go was created to be better C++ (or Java) mostly to make life easier for the thousands of developers at Google who are stuck with those two languages.

My understanding is that that is, in a single sentence, exactly why the project initially got started at Google.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Go-Google

Re: Rewriting a large production system in Go

#17

Post by MetaCosm » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 1:10 AM UTC

zzzeek wrote: post #2

> If I could get out of the 1970s and use an editor other than vi, maybe I would get some help from an IDE in this regard, but I staunchly refuse to edit code with any tool that requires using a mouse. So you've shown that Go is appealing to rigid curmudgeons. Personally I'm still hung up on the "every function (edit: that does anything which might itself return an error code, which in large scale code is quite a lot…

Don't confuse not understanding something with understanding it and thinking it is a poor idea. The Go authors understand exceptions perfectly -- they just thought that it was a bad idea: http://golang.org/doc/faq#exceptions

Re: Rewriting a large production system in Go

#18

Post by MetaCosm » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 1:13 AM UTC

lbarrow wrote: post #13

derefr wrote: post #6

You know, every time I see some Googler shocked at the effectiveness and various advantages of coding in Go, I wonder why Google never adopted Erlang. They could have been getting all these same advantages (and then some) a decade ago :)

One of the big projects they're working on in the next version of Go is to make the internal scheduler more Erlang-esque =)

Yep, full preemptive scheduler, I am very excited about it!

Re: Rewriting a large production system in Go

#19

Post by zzzeek » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 1:14 AM UTC

MetaCosm wrote: post #17

zzzeek wrote: post #2

> If I could get out of the 1970s and use an editor other than vi, maybe I would get some help from an IDE in this regard, but I staunchly refuse to edit code with any tool that requires using a mouse. So you've shown that Go is appealing to rigid curmudgeons. Personally I'm still hung up on the "every function (edit: that does anything which might itself return an error code, which in large scale code is quite a lot…

Don't confuse not understanding something with understanding it and thinking it is a poor idea. The Go authors understand exceptions perfectly -- they just thought that it was a bad idea: http://golang.org/doc/faq#exceptions

yes I've read that and their reason is "it results in convoluted code" - which is not at all my experience, programming in Java and Python for many years, it's worse in Java for sure due to the heavy emphasis on checked exceptions, but in Python they are a dream. "It also tends to encourage programmers to label too many ordinary errors, such as failing to open a file, as exceptional." also not true in my experience. I really disagree with the notion of hobbling a language just to prevent beginners from writing bad code. Beginners will always write bad code no matter what. I'm not a beginner, and I really don't need to be denied useful tools just because beginners will misuse them - I mean we're talking about improving on C/C++ for chrissakes, in the hands of a beginner those languages are like nuclear weapons. This particular FAQ entry makes it seem very much like the authors have just not seen exceptions used effectively, which I find kind of astonishing.

I watched Bruce Eckel's talk at Pycon, "Rethinking Errors - Learning from Scala and Go" (http://us.pycon.org/2013/schedule/presentation/52/) and I was so ready to be converted. But his arguments were pretty unconvincing.

Can't someone just make this case convincingly?

Re: Rewriting a large production system in Go

#20

Post by enneff » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 1:16 AM UTC

kailuowang wrote: post #15

It disheartens me a bit when people compare Go with C++. It gave me the impression that Go was created to be better C++ (or Java) mostly to make life easier for the thousands of developers at Google who are stuck with those two languages.

That is at least partially the case. The other part of the story is that no existing languages were specifically designed for programming at a large scale.

Details: http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article