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

How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

blog.iron.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 511 posts

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#321

Post by masklinn »

rdtsc wrote: post #213
rektide wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they also in Haskell as in Erlang pre-emptable by the runtime? There's certainly some cost in this design decision, more context that has to be swapped in and out and more state kept, but it's important capability to allow blind design & use- think Node, where everyone has to keep re-iterating how important it is to keep yielding to the event loop, to not do a lot of CPU work in a handler: irrelevant in Erlang wo…

> irrelevant in Erlang world Exactly. That is a subtle distinction but for cases where responsiveness and low latency is important that is key. Another thing Erlang has is isolation of process heaps. If one process crashes, it won't affect others. No shared data structures between processes. It all goes to fault tolerance but also a major win for a completely concurrent garbage collection.

> If one process crashes, it won't affect others.

Unless they're linking or monitoring one another, an other important property of tolerant and distributed system.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#322

Post by neya »

masklinn wrote: post #315
neya wrote: post #280

It's funny that they argue that they dumped the JVM derivatives like Scala, but wouldn't exactly tell why, nor support their argument with any sort of data/logs. I am genuinely curious to know why they chose Go over Scala. If it was the syntax, etc. I can partially agree because it's one of scala's weak points, but then they pitch the main reason citing performance, so I'm genuinely curious to know.

I got the same feeling from the odd dismissal of Erlang.

Exactly, you know, my advice would be to take these blog posts with a pinch of salt. There is something called as the 'mob' mindset. The mob in general can be easily manipulated to believe in something that is not true. (Remember Julius Caesar?). For example, a year or two ago we saw the whole world of start-ups adopt MongoDB with so much vigor and almost everyone started writing "Why we moved away from MySQL to MongoDB". And two years later, we have now a bunch of posts saying the opposite - "Why we moved away from MongoDB..", etc. The same thing applies to Node.JS and Go too. They are still new technologies, so I think they deserve some time to be tried and battle-tested, instead of writing zero-data driven blogposts like these at an earlier stage. I would have been much happier to have read something like "After x years of using Go, Erlang and Scala, here is our comparison on what works well and what doesn't and how each one of them perform under different conditions" instead of "Hey we just reduced our server count to 2 using Go, hence it's better than everything out there.."

Personally, just like you, I think these guys could have achieved more with Erlang or Scala, but given the fact that they chose Go because it works well for their architecture, I am not complaining.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#323

Post by redbad »

trungonnews wrote: post #232
jlarocco wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really true. Granted Go doesn't have as many libraries as the more established languages, but to say there aren't many and there's "nothing to learn besides the language" is just flat out wrong. Just for starters there's http://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/Projects

A seasoned Java developer is expected to have worked with one of the mainstream ORM like Hibernate or Ebean. But a Go developer gets away with not having to know an ORM because there is no mainstream ORM in Go. :)

ORMs are broadly considered antipatterns in Go.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#324

Post by gems »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #223
TillE wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite strange to me that people would identify as or look for a "[language] programmer". Sure, I happen to write more C++, Python, and C than anything else, but I've dabbled in just about everything and could reach comfortable proficiency in a matter of weeks. Most of programming and all of computer science is universal. Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default.

>Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default. My own experience is that there are PLENTY of programmers who have used, say, PHP and Python, but who you wouldn't want to touch your C codebase in a pair-programming session. If you've used C++ and C, then sure, you can probably jump to just about any language. Someone who's only used Python (or worse, Java or PHP) will likely be a danger to themselves and oth…

>My own experience is that there are PLENTY of programmers who have used, say, PHP and Python, but who you wouldn't want to touch your C codebase in a pair-programming session.

There are plenty of programmers that wouldn't want to touch C to begin with, regardless of past experience. Anyway, why would you ask somebody with no experience in C to develop your C codebase?

>If you've used C++ and C, then sure, you can probably jump to just about any language.

Nope.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#325

Post by pjmlp »

trungonnews wrote: post #260
yannk wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr: I tried Go, but it wasn't like Ruby, so now I'm trying Scala.

Ha. Is there a high performance, compiled, and concurrent friendly language that looks like Ruby? Please share. :)

Yes, have a look at Crystal.

https://github.com/manastech/crystal

It is still an ongoing development, though.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#326

Post by codygman »

cpprototypes wrote: post #103
MBCook wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's quite strange to me that people would identify as or look for a "[language] programmer". I understand people doing this. First you can be more sure of what you're getting. It's sad that tests like FizzBuzz are so useful, but it's a fact. If I hire a Java developer for a Java position, I can figure out there Java skills. If I look at a PHP developer, it's more of a crapshoot. They may have a lot of PHP experien…

How did you convince them to hire you when you had no professional experience? Did you have to take a pay cut to do it?

If your code in that language is good enough then you can usually get a job for it. Of course, I'm talking about places where programmer/HR department have a big overlap. I don't much like working for the other places.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#327

Post by codygman »

kamaal wrote: post #237
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default. My own experience is that there are PLENTY of programmers who have used, say, PHP and Python, but who you wouldn't want to touch your C codebase in a pair-programming session. If you've used C++ and C, then sure, you can probably jump to just about any language. Someone who's only used Python (or worse, Java or PHP) will likely be a danger to themselves and oth…

Starting out with Python as a newbie is disastrous. I started out with assembly, then went to C and then all the C-family based languages. Non C-family languages are actually rare enough to neglect for 99% of all programming tasks today. Always remember going from something difficult to simple is easy, but going from something simple to difficult is not easy.

I disagree. My path went like this:

HTML->CSS->php->javascript->C#->Visual Basic->Java->Ruby->Python->C->Go->Scheme->Lisp->Haskell

I believe the "python way" and "pythonic" code that the community pushes is great for newbies, since it gets them thinking about not just writing code, but writing it idiomatically.

This, in turn, makes most think about why doing it the "pythonic" way works better.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#328

Post by yuhong »

shurcooL wrote: post #20

> "We also weren't sure if we would be able hire top talent if we chose Go, but we soon found out that we could get top talent because we chose Go." I feel[1] that a smart/talented C/C++/anything developer can go from someone who has never seen or heard of golang to a proficient and productive Go developer in a matter of a few weeks, maybe even _days_, if not less. That's how long it takes to go through the following…

Yea, michaelochurch have talked about that one before.

Re: How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

#330

Post by redbad »

martinced wrote: post #134
jianshen wrote: post #8

Hey that's my photo of the GOpher! :) [1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/jianshen/8080852738/in/photostr...

+1 for the cool monitor stands but geez... Invest some $$$ in a real keyboard: scissor switches are the most painful type of keyboard switches ever : (

The Apple wireless keyboard is the best keyboard on the market right now IMO.
Post reply on HN