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Google App Engine for Go

code.google.com

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Re: Google App Engine for Go

#21

Post by wmf »

forgotusername wrote: post #14

Can anyone confirm if this allows linking native libraries? From the looks of the "compiler", it seems it might be hacked to produce a binary statically linked against, say, SpiderMonkey. Beyond coolness, it seems a waste of effort to tailor this release to Go, when similar effort might have been expended, e.g. to define a simple protocol talked over a UNIX fd that any static x86 binary could implement to integrate w…

It looks like the answer is no. You upload your Go source code and App Engine compiles and runs it; you don't upload binaries.

Re: Google App Engine for Go

#23

Post by dchest »

bgentry wrote: post #19

It looks like this is still going to be limited to HTTP (port 80) web applications. So you won't be able to run a process like Doozer that communicates with other ports/protocols. EDIT: More details from the docs at http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/go/runtime.html An App Engine application cannot: -write to the filesystem. Applications must use the App Engine datastore for storing persistent data. Reading from t…

With the announcement of backends (http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/app-engine-150-r...), I suspect long-running processes will be available in Go in the future as well.

Re: Google App Engine for Go

#24

Post by bgentry »

dchest wrote: post #23
bgentry wrote: post #19

It looks like this is still going to be limited to HTTP (port 80) web applications. So you won't be able to run a process like Doozer that communicates with other ports/protocols. EDIT: More details from the docs at http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/go/runtime.html An App Engine application cannot: -write to the filesystem. Applications must use the App Engine datastore for storing persistent data. Reading from t…

With the announcement of backends ( http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/app-engine-150-r... ), I suspect long-running processes will be available in Go in the future as well.

Thanks for the info, didn't realize they launched this feature as well. I doubt it will take them long to bring it to Go.

Re: Google App Engine for Go

#25

Post by Detrus »

gecko wrote: post #8
fortes wrote: post #6

Any advantage (performance? memory use?) for using Go vs. Python? Or is just programming language preference?

I've been enjoying using Go as a C replacement when I need more performance than Python, but don't actually need to use C. It's been fine for that purpose. I would note that they do keep changing the syntax on a fairly regular basis, the libraries are still young, and I do find the language oddly unexpressive in places compared to even C++ with boost. (E.g., no ternary operator, no list comprehensions, using the same…

Pretty interesting. What do you think of the quote from this article http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2518609 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/05/google_go/print.html

"Google has people who administer apps and services, and they need to, say, write tools that say scrape a few thousand machines statuses and aggregate the data," he says. "Previously, these operations people would write these in Python, but they're finding that Go is much faster in terms of performance and time to actually write the code."

Clever marketing or could Google's problems actually be handled better by Go than Python, in time to code?

Re: Google App Engine for Go

#26

Post by supersillyus »

kingkilr wrote: post #18
supersillyus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faster than Python, better memory use for many types of programs. Compared to Java, less memory use and (I assume) much less start-up time, since no VM is needed. Also, since you can use goroutines, it would seem like you'd be able to do concurrent requests without having to have a special async API like Java/Python have. Go seems like it'll be a pretty great fit for App Engine.

Faster than CPython maybe, last time someone did a benchmark of Go vs. Python webservers PyPy came out on top.

I'd be interested in a link to that benchmark if you have it.

I assumed that you're talking about http://ziutek.github.com/web_bench/, but that makes no mention of PyPy (other than a HN comment that PyPy takes 2x the memory) and Go comes out on top in that benchmark.

Either way, when saying Go is faster, I wasn't talking specifically about it's http library or io system (I assume both are similar in speed to Pythons). I more meant that if you're going to be writing custom CPU-intensive code to run on App Engine, assuming the same algorithm, Go should be faster. It has better constant factors, and it gives you better control over allocation.

I don't know PyPy well enough to say in what situations it outperforms Go (especially considering that I don't know what kind of VM warm-up you can expect on App Engine), but since GAE doesn't run PyPy, it's not relevant to the discussion of Python v Go on App Engine.

Re: Google App Engine for Go

#27

Post by kingkilr »

supersillyus wrote: post #26
kingkilr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faster than CPython maybe, last time someone did a benchmark of Go vs. Python webservers PyPy came out on top.

I'd be interested in a link to that benchmark if you have it. I assumed that you're talking about http://ziutek.github.com/web_bench/ , but that makes no mention of PyPy (other than a HN comment that PyPy takes 2x the memory) and Go comes out on top in that benchmark. Either way, when saying Go is faster, I wasn't talking specifically about it's http library or io system (I assume both are similar in speed to Pythons…

Yep that was the original benchmark, and I ran a PyPy vs. CPython comparison on the same code from which we can extrapolate: http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/fr4w9/benchmarking_g...

Re: Google App Engine for Go

#29

Post by arturadib »

It's going to be a tough sale for Google to convince people to adopt Go for their web apps when Node.js is taking over that scene. With Node I get the best of two worlds: high concurrency and speed -- presumably the top two selling points for using Go with web apps -- without having to teach myself yet another programming paradigm. Everyone and their mother knows some Javascript; good luck hiring help for your Go-based startup.

IMHO, Google could be riding a much bigger wave right now...

Re: Google App Engine for Go

#30

Post by gecko »

Detrus wrote: post #25
gecko wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been enjoying using Go as a C replacement when I need more performance than Python, but don't actually need to use C. It's been fine for that purpose. I would note that they do keep changing the syntax on a fairly regular basis, the libraries are still young, and I do find the language oddly unexpressive in places compared to even C++ with boost. (E.g., no ternary operator, no list comprehensions, using the same…

Pretty interesting. What do you think of the quote from this article http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2518609 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/05/google_go/print.html "Google has people who administer apps and services, and they need to, say, write tools that say scrape a few thousand machines statuses and aggregate the data," he says. "Previously, these operations people would write these in Python, but they'…

I think this may be specific to Google's situation--at least for now. PyPI may not be as comprehensive as CPAN, but it's rare these days that I can't "pip install" my way into having half the solution done before I start writing code. The same simply isn't (yet) true for Go.

Google has many custom components, though. I personally don't write Go nearly as quickly as I write Python, but I have 4+ years of writing Python in everything from tiny scripts up to large applications, both for the desktop and for the web. I have maybe twenty to forty hours of experience writing Go code, absolute tops. It's not a fair comparison. If we assume that the Googlers who are claiming to be more productive in Go than Python have a couple orders of magnitude on me, and that they don't need many prefabricated libraries, and I find the claim plausible.

I don't believe it'd currently be true in the general case, though.

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