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New case studies about Google’s use of Go

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Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#81

Post by the_af »

mabbo wrote: post #75

While I do trust Rob Pike to not let personal biases sway his writing, I do have to wonder if the case studies weren't selecting because they were positive. So I'm curious: does anyone have a case study where using Go was a disaster? Every language has things it's good at, and things it's bad at. Where does Go not do well?

I know a case (second hand) where they migrated from a Java backend to Go, then had to roll it all back to Java because it was too hard and error prone to maintain. This is a very successful business, not a startup. No idea why they felt they had to migrate to Go in the first place.

I'd rather not mention the company, even though I did not work there.

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#82

Post by lstamour »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #73
lstamour wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust doesn't have the stability yet that has been a bit of a double-edged sword for Go. And it's taken 5 years for Rust to get as far as it has. I'll be much more interested in using Rust in production when there's more of a "standard library" of options to start with. Right now it has the curse of being both unfamiliar to programmers and not having very many production-ready dependencies available in a larger ecosys…

Does C# rely on VS? MSBuild is separate from VS and you can use Rider (yay!) or VSCode instead of VS. The ecosystem is definitely growing in the last 5 years too since open source has been embraced by MS and the community. The major rewrite of .NET -> .NET Core and then now renaming it back to .NET again is good in that it's a much better framework now, bad in that it's turning out like Python 2 vs Python 3. Huge pro…

Generally speaking, C# relies on either third-party implementations like http://www.omnisharp.net or Microsoft distributions, which on Windows is largely distributed via Visual Studio Downloads page, including the Tools for Visual Studio package: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/ Are there other releases of msbuild, for example? Yes: https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/releases But are they separate from releases of Visual Studio? No, as the release notes indicate. If you want to live on the bleeding edge of .NET development -- and I do recommend this -- you'll end up in the Preview channel of Visual Studio: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/preview/ and if you want to use Visual Studio Code instead, welcome to OmniSharp or similar "mostly compatible" solutions. It's totally fine until it's not, and it's definitely not portable or open enough -- yet. I look forward to the day when Visual Studio is fully open source because they can include subscriptions on top or something. That'll be the day when VS and VS Code could begin to merge a bit, at least for development on Microsoft platforms. But that hasn't happened yet, and they're rebuilding Visual Studio in Eclipse on other platforms to better support cross-platform development the same way Rider supports other platforms for JetBrains IDEs. It's a stop-gap until the fully-open-source versions of VS and VS Tools are finally available. I suspect they're waiting for .NET 5 or later, at this point...

They're undoing the split between Core and .NET Framework by suggesting that they'll ship both within .NET 5 using shims or implementations of drop-in replacements for .NET Framework code to use. Imagine if after dropping Python 2 support there was a mode that scanned for Python 2 code and enabled it again, on a file-by-file basis, to work with newer Unicode strings using some kind of translation layer in the runtime. That's kind of what's happening here, I think, but maybe more lightweight than suggested. Legacy .NET Framework code still deprecated, but interoperability libraries will ship as part of the runtime or SDK, will have some amount of shims available. I haven't followed the details closely enough to say more than this, though. I last looked into it a few months ago.

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#83

Post by saagarjha »

zemnmez wrote: post #74
colesantiago wrote: post #8

You can see more very exciting case studies of companies using Go here, didn't know until now Twitch or Facebook (and even Target!) uses Go a lot. https://go.dev/solutions/#case-studies

All backend systems at save a few minor exceptions are written in Go :)

This isn't true at all. Google still runs a lot of backend on Java, for example.

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#84

Post by piazz »

I played around with Go a while ago, and while I appreciated the approach to concurrency, I was really put off by both the boilerplate + how primitive the type system felt. Not having map and filter due to lack of generics meant writing for loops all over the place just to filter and modify arrays. Appending elements to slices felt clumsy. The type system didn't feel expressive, and I often found myself having to resort to the empty interface escape hatch.

Compare this with Typescript (or Swift, or Rust), which have type systems capable of modeling nearly any problem domain. Go doesn't have algebraic data types (sum types) which are incredibly useful in my experience (Swift/Rust enums, Typescript discriminated unions). I'm honestly not sure why I would use Go over TS, unless performance was my primary consideration. It feels like Go was designing to be as inoffensive as possible to a legion of new-grad Google programmers, and you sacrifice most modern language niceties for it. Please convince me I'm wrong, because I really wanted to like Go.

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#86

Post by ridv »

Knut4231 wrote: post #56
warent wrote: post #50

I absolutely love using Go. The logical flows for my programs are always so clean and easy to follow thanks to the language. Contrast to C++ in which spaghetti and magic is basically idiomatic. The only downside I can think of is that error/crash recovery is pretty tricky, but it's only really a concern if you're careless with your goroutines. Whenever I work in Go, I have a lot more confidence in the efficiency of r…

I have a love/hate relationship with Rust. I love the type system as enthusiast, but as project lead I can't justify relying on so many (partly immature) third party dependencies for business critical stuff.

I had similar feelings when I was hired to write in Go about 3 years ago. Coming from Java where everything (including the kitchen sink) was available for import, it took some time to re-adjust my mindset of having to seek out libraries and thoroughly vet them.

After a while, I kinda started to dig having to do it. You end up having a more personal connection with the dependencies you pick which makes it easier to contribute back upstream.

The one downside of being around in this stage of a language's ecosystem development is you can potentially get some pretty undesirable fragmentation.

A good example that comes to mind is one of the original Go library to interact with Zookeeper. There's like 6 maintained forks of that library due to the original author bowing out of maintaining it.

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#87

Post by networkimprov »

mabbo wrote: post #75

While I do trust Rob Pike to not let personal biases sway his writing, I do have to wonder if the case studies weren't selecting because they were positive. So I'm curious: does anyone have a case study where using Go was a disaster? Every language has things it's good at, and things it's bad at. Where does Go not do well?

Discord abandoned Go due to GC overhead.

https://blog.discord.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to...

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#88

Post by Mr_T_ »

piazz wrote: post #84

I played around with Go a while ago, and while I appreciated the approach to concurrency, I was really put off by both the boilerplate + how primitive the type system felt. Not having map and filter due to lack of generics meant writing for loops all over the place just to filter and modify arrays. Appending elements to slices felt clumsy. The type system didn't feel expressive, and I often found myself having to res…

You'll be happy with the latest developments: https://blog.golang.org/generics-next-step

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#89

Post by idoubtit »

PostThisTooFast wrote: post #6

Kinda tired of the proliferation of languages coming out of Google, whether they actually created them or not. If Go is so great, why was Kotlin released four years later and made the standard on Android? It's annoying enough to have to use Swift and Kotlin for iOS/Mac vs. Android. Now Go? What happened to Dart? Then there's Rust. What about next week?

If you're really wondering why different programming languages exist, the answer is simple: different use cases, and the influence of past languages. Bell Labs did the same by creating C, C++ and AWK.

For any of the languages you mentioned, it's easy to find the motivation for their creation, either by Wikipedia or on official pages Why X?. Your uninformed rant sounded a bit lazy and naive (sorry, no offense intended).

From the top of my head... Go was meant as a higher-level language than C where Python could not apply (bad performance, weak typing, no compilation, complex syntax); its wide adoption proves that kind of language was missing at the time. Dart was initially meant as an alternative to JavaScript, like CoffeScript, at a time where JS was less standard. Kotlin was not created by Google, and was meant as a light alternative to Java/JVM, with full compatibility, hence the adoption for Android which is JVM based. As far as I know, Swift and Rust aren't specifically tied to Google.

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#90

Post by saagarjha »

Knut4231 wrote: post #45
saagarjha wrote: post #17

Important point: this is Google's use of Go, not your use of Go. Take note to check whether their results are applicable to you before adding it to your repertoire of "reasons we should use Go at our company".

https://go.dev/solutions#case-studies Link from the article Honestly, it's not breaking news that Go is used heavily outside Google.

No, it's not, I was just talking about the article itself rather than the case studies from the past.
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