I'm using the standard library

#1

Post by rly_ItsMe » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 11:51 AM UTC

I'm using the standard library
ghost.bubbleclub.de

Re: I'm using the standard library

#2

Post by Monkeyget » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 12:12 PM UTC

8Mb is less than a thousand of a percent of my hard drive. That space is well worth the convenience of not having to worry about installing a language/checking version/compiling/whatever.

Re: I'm using the standard library

#3

Post by bsg75 » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 2:33 PM UTC

I am willing to sacrifice a few MB per program for the convenience of copy-and-run.

Re: I'm using the standard library

#4

Post by dpritchett » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 3:04 PM UTC

As an entertaining counterpoint, here's Kelsey Hightower's "Go for Sysadmins" from Gophercon where he repeatedly touts the "paste a link to your cross-compiled binary in an internal chatroom" benefits of Go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41GffiXhN6I

I understand what you're saying and I'm a big fan of shell scripting myself, but dependency-free single-binary deployments are very, very convenient.

I upvoted this story because I find the topic interesting even though I don't really agree.

Re: I'm using the standard library

#5

Post by ANTSANTS » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 3:16 PM UTC

Does the go linker attempt any dead code elimination across libraries? Static linking is handy for distributing binaries but 8 megabytes does seem a bit excessive for a relatively simple program.

Then again, it isn't so out of place nowadays when you see how big a statically linked C program can get when linked against glibc...

Re: I'm using the standard library

#6

Post by nemothekid » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 3:28 PM UTC

To answer the OP's objection clearly - the usefulness of a single binary that works anywhere trumps any benefit from having a smaller binary, especially in 2014 when we have 1TB harddrives and 10Gbe connections.

Having python installed as a pre-req on most OSes doesn't even seem valid to me. For the project OP posted, any idiomatic python programmer today will most likely use the "requests" library, which isn't part of the stdlib.

Re: I'm using the standard library

#7

Post by lkrubner » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 3:33 PM UTC

dpritchett wrote: post #4

As an entertaining counterpoint, here's Kelsey Hightower's "Go for Sysadmins" from Gophercon where he repeatedly touts the "paste a link to your cross-compiled binary in an internal chatroom" benefits of Go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41GffiXhN6I I understand what you're saying and I'm a big fan of shell scripting myself, but dependency-free single-binary deployments are very, very convenient. I upvoted this sto…

I agree with this:

"but dependency-free single-binary deployments are very, very convenient"

On a semi-related topic, my first exposure to programming on the JVM was through Clojure, where it is common to use the Leinengen build/dependency manager, and which allows the creation of an uberjar, which offers what you mention, "dependency-free single-binary deployments".

Then I started doing some actual Java development, and I was surprised that uberjars are somewhat uncommon among Java projects. There is a plugin for Maven that allows the creation of uberjars, but many projects use complicated application servers and the co-location of needed jars -- a system that seems complicated and fragile. I ended up using Buildr as my build system, but it doesn't seem to offer an uberjar option, at least nothing as convenient as what is offered by Leinengen. Given the convenience of uberjars, I would think they would be more common Java projects. Apparently they are avoided because so many Java projects are huge (with many thousands of classes) and so a common uberjar pattern (of exploding all dependencies to the same level) runs into the problem of name collisions. Which brings up another issue relevant to Go and Clojure, the small size of many apps, the ease of going with a micro-services architecture, greatly increases the ease of deployment as well.

Re: I'm using the standard library

#8

Post by awakened » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 3:36 PM UTC

You can strip and pack in many cases and reduce the size dramatically while still having a statically linked binary.

Re: I'm using the standard library

#9

Post by _ZeD_ » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 4:05 PM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #6

To answer the OP's objection clearly - the usefulness of a single binary that works anywhere trumps any benefit from having a smaller binary, especially in 2014 when we have 1TB harddrives and 10Gbe connections. Having python installed as a pre-req on most OSes doesn't even seem valid to me. For the project OP posted, any idiomatic python programmer today will most likely use the "requests" library, which isn't part…

Truth to be told, while "request" is a fine library, it's not true that "any idiomatic python programmer today will most likely use [it]".

A small, vocal minority sure use it, but I'm sure far, far many programmers (like myself) are perfectly happy to use urllib2.

Re: I'm using the standard library

#10

Post by revelation » Fri, Aug 01, 2014, 4:06 PM UTC

Go binaries are particularly braindead in that you can't strip them. They just don't work without the debug information.

(8MB is the size of the flash on a OpenWRT router running full blown Linux)