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Things from Python I'd miss in Go

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Re: Things from Python I'd miss in Go

#3

Post by jgrahamc »

Towards the end of the article there seems to be a confusion between servers and web servers. Yes, Go is nice for writing servers, no, web servers aren't the only things out there doing 'serving' in systems-land.

Three examples from CloudFlare all written in Go:

1. Our Internet compression/optimization technology called Railgun

2. Our DNS server

3. Our CA infrastructure

All are networked, all are highly concurrent.

Also, our entire logging and analysis infrastructure is being migrated to Go.

PS Forgot that we also recently rewrote the code that does image compression (using C tools) in Go as well. Here the Go code is working as a job server.

Re: Things from Python I'd miss in Go

#4

Post by Kurtz79 »

Sometimes we get so invested in a language that we forget that it's just a tool, and a good engineer/hacker should try to choose the best one for the problem at hand.

Go is just another tool in our toolbox: as the author says it sacrifices some of Python's friendliness and ease of use (but not as much as other compiled/statically typed languages) and features for performance and a solid concurrency model.

It's up to us to decide what the best fit for our applications is.

Even if Go it's definitely not "The Language to rule them all", it's nice to have more options.

Re: Things from Python I'd miss in Go

#5

Post by nkozyra »

The error handling one is an area I've never understood - in a well-designed Go app errors will be returned from functions/methods and you'll either deal with them or not _/err.

I love try/catch/finally but I fail to see how doing either a _ or writing a simple log function to do something with returned errors necessarily represents "more code" than handling exceptions.

Re: Things from Python I'd miss in Go

#6

Post by ironchef »

jgrahamc wrote: post #3

Towards the end of the article there seems to be a confusion between servers and web servers. Yes, Go is nice for writing servers, no, web servers aren't the only things out there doing 'serving' in systems-land. Three examples from CloudFlare all written in Go: 1. Our Internet compression/optimization technology called Railgun 2. Our DNS server 3. Our CA infrastructure All are networked, all are highly concurrent. A…

"Also, our entire logging and analysis infrastructure is being migrated to Go." This intrigues me. I've been moving a lot of ETL into Go (as it's pretty well suited to this), but I still end up doing a lot of the analytics in Spark (for bigger work) or Pandas or R (for smaller bits of data). What are you guys planning on doing for the analytics? Or is it more of straight up time series work (so you can use influx + whatever). Just curious and keep up the good work :)

Re: Things from Python I'd miss in Go

#7

Post by alfor »

jgrahamc wrote: post #3

Towards the end of the article there seems to be a confusion between servers and web servers. Yes, Go is nice for writing servers, no, web servers aren't the only things out there doing 'serving' in systems-land. Three examples from CloudFlare all written in Go: 1. Our Internet compression/optimization technology called Railgun 2. Our DNS server 3. Our CA infrastructure All are networked, all are highly concurrent. A…

It seems that you have the canonical type of use case for Go.

Server systems for thousands of customer and huge number of requests. Python became a jack of all trade where concurrency and performance is not the main focus.

Re: Things from Python I'd miss in Go

#8

Post by jgrahamc »

ironchef wrote: post #6
jgrahamc wrote: post #3

Towards the end of the article there seems to be a confusion between servers and web servers. Yes, Go is nice for writing servers, no, web servers aren't the only things out there doing 'serving' in systems-land. Three examples from CloudFlare all written in Go: 1. Our Internet compression/optimization technology called Railgun 2. Our DNS server 3. Our CA infrastructure All are networked, all are highly concurrent. A…

"Also, our entire logging and analysis infrastructure is being migrated to Go." This intrigues me. I've been moving a lot of ETL into Go (as it's pretty well suited to this), but I still end up doing a lot of the analytics in Spark (for bigger work) or Pandas or R (for smaller bits of data). What are you guys planning on doing for the analytics? Or is it more of straight up time series work (so you can use influx + w…

Since I'm not actually involved in that project I'm going to defer answering until we write a detailed blog post.

Also, if you are interested in a job...

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