Go at SoundCloud

http://backstage.soundcloud.com/2012/07/go-at-soundcloud/

by cypriend • 14 years ago

188 108 14 years ago

backstage.soundcloud.com

mseepgood6• 14 years ago

ʕ ◔ϖ◔ʔ <- Gopher

truebosko• 14 years ago

The way they describe Go as a WYSIWYG language makes me think of functional programming languages (e.g. mostly of elimination of side effects.)

geoka9• 14 years ago

It makes me think of getting rid of OOP and saying goodbye to the overengineering overhead it involves.

It took us 25 years to begin to see that the king is naked!

UPDATE: I have a feeling that in 25 years we'll be dissing the current fad du jour - functional programming.

mseepgood6• 14 years ago

But Go doesn't get rid of OOP, it just fixes it.

exDM692• 14 years ago

I agree. For some reason the whole OOP thing got really out of hands and has been force fed into a whole generation of programmers. Yet there's no real evidence that OOP is the right way to go. And then there was the whole Java deal where the "everything is an object" mantra was taken so far that it hurts. The result is probably the most expensive mistake in the history of computing with machines.

> UPDATE: I have a feeling that in 25 years we'll be dissing the current fad du jour - functional programming.

In 25 years, we will be laughing at the present for sure. I just disagree on what that fad is (functional programming is hardly popular enough to be called a "fad", but it's been bubbling under for 30+ years). I think it is dynamic programming languages like Ruby and Python, which to some degree are great but fall apart quickly. Another candidate is Node.js -style asynchronous programming, which will be laughed at once a mainstream language ships with a proper async model like the IO manager of Haskell or Erlang.

stcredzero• 14 years ago

> It took us 25 years to begin to see that the king is naked!

That king is an impostor. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AlanKayQuotes

> UPDATE: I have a feeling that in 25 years we'll be dissing the current fad du jour - functional programming.

Only if unwashed masses start doing a half-baked version of FP without really understanding it. This is what happened to OO. It's similar to what happens to musical genres.

jbooth• 14 years ago

In 25 years, the kids will still be trying to decide which approach is black-and-white "correct", while the experienced will still be using a blend of styles depending on the given problem.

Eliminating side effects sounds brilliant until you start interacting with filesystems or networks. What, you can't memoize those ops or split them across a pmap?

zemo3• 14 years ago

...Go still has objects. It's not the notion of binding functions to data that's flawed; it's classical inheritance that's flawed.

anon012• 14 years ago

We've just started using Go as well. It smokes our Python app in terms of speed, and is fun to use (maybe just because it's new?).

I have always wondered, however, that if moving to a new language seems great because of the language, or because you have such a better understanding of the implementation of the problem you are trying to solve.

agentultra• 14 years ago

You bring up an interesting point about "new."

New is fun. Exploration is fun. I think a lot of people will swear by a new language simply because it's not old and probably doesn't suffer many of the same deficiencies they're used to in their "every day," language.

This to me is an illusion however. One must remain skeptical and treat new, untested languages with even more scrutiny than an old one. Many of these new languages will make extraordinary claims. Discovering the evidence to support these claims is often left as an exercise to the programmer.

That being said, new has a lot of advantages. It's free to try to break away from past paradigms that perhaps limited programmers. Stability can always come later once the core ideas have been fleshed out. And it's always fun to work on fresh ideas rather than refining the same old ones that we're plagued with.

Personally I wouldn't use a language and compiler that only just reached 1.0 this year in a production system. If I was really interested in Go I'd certainly hack with it and perhaps on it, but I wouldn't trust it to be reliable. Maybe that makes me an old, stodgy fart but I trust wisdom over brilliance when it comes to building systems that are dependable and robust.

luriel2• 14 years ago

Go has been surprisingly reliable and stable, even before it hit 1.0 a few months ago quite a few people (including Google) were using it in production: http://go-lang.cat-v.org/organizations-using-go

With Go 1.0 there is an even greater focus on stability: http://golang.org/doc/go1compat.html

Go is also quite different from most 'new' languages, many people find it to be the most fun language they have used in a long time (even after using many other new languages).

This might be in part because one of the things that makes Go special (and my favorite "feature") is not just the features it has, but all the stuff it doesn't have.

Go is simple and doesn't get on the way and lets you focus on the problem, other "new" languages are often described as "powerful", but much of the work involves using their "features", when Go is more often described as productive, the focus is not in the language and its features but on the problem you are trying to solve and the language gets out of the way.

icebraining• 14 years ago

Is it really helpful to judge a language by its version number? Go is a very conservative language, in that it only uses well known and studied language features, and has been in production at many companies, including Google, Canonical, CloudFlare, etc.

Certainly it deserves more faith than any random language designed for the exploration of new paradigms and features and which is only used by its maker?

jlouis• 14 years ago

New vs Better is also an interesting point. In this case, Go is a leap forward from Python in terms of language quality and predictability. It even provides you are proper concurrency framework - something all modern languages need.

pjmlp2• 14 years ago

> It smokes our Python app in terms of speed

Like any other compiled language would do.

zaiste• 14 years ago

Nowadays, polyglot approach is the only right path for a software company. When I arrived in Berlin a month ago, I was positively surprised that SoundCloud supports local Clojure or functional programming groups. Keep up with great work!

_ak• 14 years ago

And, of course, they regularly host the Berlin Go User Group.

ungerik2• 14 years ago

Go also works very well at STARTeurope, powering our event-platform http://startuplive.in/ Developing a high level webframework from scratch just for one website was a bit of a crazy undertaking: https://github.com/ungerik/go-start (sorry, the documentation needs a big update and a tutorial. Most time was spent on running stuff and shipping features...).

ungerik2• 14 years ago

Just don't use Go on 32bit systems, the 32bit garbage collector leaks. On 64bit systems everything is rock solid.

Symmetry2• 14 years ago

Garbage collection is actually a lot easier with 64 bit pointers, since the odds of a random collision between pointers and non-pointer data goes way, way down. And because the ratio of memory in use to total address space goes down.

shortlived• 14 years ago

  especially, as most new engineers on Go projects lament, during error handling

Does any have pointers to reading material or care to explain the lack of error handling in Go?

zemo3• 14 years ago

it's not there there's no error handling; it's that there's no exceptions. Instead, you use multiple return values, one of which is an error, and you check the return value for an error. It forces you to handle errors at the call site and makes diapers unimplementable.

chengiz• 14 years ago

How does it force you to handle errors? Cant you choose to ignore the return value?

awj• 14 years ago

> It forces you to handle errors at the call site and makes diapers unimplementable.

I don't see how the latter is true. What's the practical difference between wrapping a function call in a try/(no-op)catch and entirely ignoring the error return value?

dhconnelly• 14 years ago

Go doesn't "lack error-handling." They're referring to the fact that Go doesn't have exceptions; you check return codes to detect and handle errors. For some this is tedious, but has advantages (mentioned in the article) with respect to understanding an entire program.

ntrel• 14 years ago

The problem is it's no better than C - the correct way is to return sum types, either values or errors. A good language would statically check that any returned values are only used when there are no errors, preventing invalid values being accessed.

This requires some flow analysis, but brings real benefit and safety.

swdunlop• 14 years ago

Right. Early in learning golang, many people will get tired of typing:

    ..., err := doStuff()
    if err != nil {
        return err
    }

The usual text editor features, like templates, reduce the typing, but the point is that the programmer must think, each time, about what they want to do when a function fails. This can become either a really good habit, or a distraction, depending on your perspective and problem domain.

When people say Go poor or no error handling, this is probably what they are complaining about. The fundamental properties offered by try/catch/throw are unpacked by Go into defer, recover and multiple value returns and type switches. Go's designers make the argument that when used thoughtlessly, exceptions encourages error handling antipatterns.

fjellfras3• 14 years ago

What sort of development environment are others here using for go (if using it at all, of course) ? I've had reasonably good experience with the go-mode in emacs.

redbad2• 14 years ago

Sublime Text 2 + GoSublime has been a really great experience for me.

http://www.sublimetext.com/2

https://github.com/DisposaBoy/GoSublime

fjellfras3• 14 years ago

Interesting that sublime text comes up. I have been looking for a "bells and whistles" sort of IDE for python for a few days now, I am traditionally a unix person so I have moved along nicely with both vim and emacs as needed, but at this point I need to work with a full featured IDE.

I am using the evaluation version of pycharm and I must say it is quite impressive, although paying for an editor does seem odd after using emacs for so many years but it is a well designed software and I think worth the price.

That said I have been asked to give sublime text a try and I must say it looks a lot better than pycharm, I think will give it a try next (it is certainly a lot cheaper and if I understand correctly has much wider language support than pycharm).

shawnps• 14 years ago

I'm using vim with the vim plugins that come in go/misc/vim. I use :Import and :Drop for adding and removing imports, and :Fmt to run gofmt in vim. I also have a git pre-commit hook that runs gofmt.

stock_toaster• 14 years ago

Whoah. I had a few vim configs from a while back, but hadn't checked for anything new. Thanks! :Fmt, :Import/:Drop, and :Godoc are glorious.

jff• 14 years ago

I use Acme, simply because it's got good buffer management and a useful editing language. I also used go-mode about a year ago, before I got sick of emacs.

ssteel• 14 years ago

I'm one of the project owners on the GoClipse project. I do a lot of polyglot development (Java, Javascript, C, Go, & a little Python). I've used and liked vim, Sublime w/ GoSublime, and GoClipse. All with gocode. I have a hard time escaping Eclipse, in general, because of my skill profile. It kind of unifies the experience.

http://code.google.com/p/goclipse/ https://github.com/nsf/gocode

andrewbinstock• 14 years ago

LiteIDE X (http://code.google.com/p/liteide) is a small, portable IDE for Go with package management, build management, and compilation from within the IDE. Also, light debugging support. And, OSS, of course. I've used it on smallish Go projects without problems.

goostavos2• 14 years ago

I'm still a bit of a novice, could someone elaborate on what he means by operator overloading being "problem creating?" I thought that was one of the main, 'core' concepts of OOP. Inheritance, and polymorphism.

How would you make something like a GUI without being able to specialize classes by overriding certain methods?

Have I misunderstood his point?

paraboul• 14 years ago

Opertor overloading is really horrible.

By reading the code "foo + bar" you can't know what is really doing internally.

He is talking about operator (+-*=[]&) overloading. Not method overloading.

gurkendoktor2• 14 years ago

And how do you know what add(foo, bar) does internally?

pcwalton3• 14 years ago

I wish I could agree, but experience has shown that not having operator overloading makes (a) operating polymorphically over different number types and (b) creating new number types (decimals, bigints, etc.) really awkward. The former is much of the reason we had to add it to Rust. We have matrices that can operate over any numeric type T that implements the basic operations (so we can write matrix math once and have it work on 32-bit floats and 64-bit floats; this is important for speed vs. precision for browsers vs. scientific computing), but we couldn't put an addition operator in the Num interface, so we had to make "add", "sub", etc. methods. The result made our matrix math operations nigh-unreadable.

rat873• 14 years ago

"foo + bar" looks like a string

Lewisham4• 14 years ago

His point is that, if you aren't familiar with the code, operator overloading can be difficult to read. It gives objects the appearance of being native types, and it is sometimes not entirely clear what the result of the overload might be. What does "dog + cat" equal? In an extreme example, if you are crazy enough, it might make sense to have animal + animal = baby animal. You need to temper that example down to something closer to reality :)

I personally like overloading, but I think it's probably too easy to abuse, and I can see how it would cause problems with a team size larger than 5.

As far as I can see, whenever the Go team encountered a language feature that could possibly be abused, they always deferred to leaving it out. Whether that is good or bad I'm not sure we will know until we have years of experience with it.

luriel2• 14 years ago

> As far as I can see, whenever the Go team encountered a language feature that could possibly be abused, they always deferred to leaving it out.

All features can be abused.

The Go philosophy is more to leave out features that obscure the meaning and understanding of code (what is also known as "magic").

Also part of the Go philosophy is to not include any feature unless it is clear that its benefits are greater than its costs, and which might interact in unpredictable ways with other existing features.

In other words, the default is to leave things out, rather than to include them, the opposite of a kitchen sink approach.

goostavos2• 14 years ago

Ah, that makes sense. Really good explanation. Thanks!

WalterBright• 14 years ago

I think the poster child for operator overloading abuse is iostreams overloading << and >>.

However, operator overloading is very much needed for when creating user defined types that have arithmetic properties, such as bigint, or matrix.

As for the confusion about whether + means "add" or "concatenate", that is unresolvable. The D programming language deals with it by introducing the ~ binary operator to mean "concatenate". No more problems.

Although in D one can overload operators to mean any crazy thing one wants to, the consensus in the community is to eschew non-arithmetic use in the same manner that the C community has condemned:

    #define BEGIN {
    #define END }

mseebach• 14 years ago

The argument is roughly that it is, in fact, not very useful, while opening up a vast array of misuses - especially in the domain of being all too clever. What does "+" mean on a list and an object? Add, probably. But what if it's two lists? Union? Or add the second list as the last element to the first? Named functions "add" and "union" aren't any less readable and loads more descriptive.

The only situation you positively need operator overloading is when doing arithmetic, and you should do that using the built in types. This, of course, sucks when the built in types are inadequate, and you e.g. want to use a arbitrary precision library such as BigDecimal in Java.

This, of course, is an opinion, and I'm not shy to admit it's been shaped by being burned by Lift, the Scala web framework which makes heavy use of symbolic function names which makes it incredibly difficult to talk about or search for answers online.

Lewisham4• 14 years ago

Of course, Go itself is completely unsearchable, so you always have to search for Golang, which means that thee mut be hundreds of pages that get missed.

dschobel• 14 years ago

Doesn't ruby with its "operators are actually methods and fair-game for redefinition" implementation disprove the theory operator overloading is an a priori Bad Idea (tm)?

Those guys seem to manage the flexibility pretty well.

mseepgood6• 14 years ago

Operator overloading has nothing to do with OOP.

In go you get polymorphism via interfaces and you can share implementation via embedding. http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#embedding

skybrian4• 14 years ago

I haven't seen a GUI written in Go yet, but the basic idea is that you don't customize via inheritance; you do it in a different way. For example, in many UI libraries, you can create a function and ask a widget to call you when you receive an event; the widget will have methods like:

  addClickHandler(myFunction)

Any customization you could do with inheritance could be done with a callback function instead, provided that the object has the hook you want.

In Go, there is also an "interface" which is basically a set of methods.

LinaLauneBaer3• 14 years ago

That is more or less how UIs using Cocoa/Cocoa Touch are working from a developer standpoint of view. Most standard views/controls have a delegate property which is informed about certain things happening or asked when an important decision has to be made. This works extremely well and by implementing a delegate you get around the problems related to subclassing UI controls/views. Now that Objective-C/C has blocks Apple began to replace (or add) block based "callbacks" which makes life easier in most cases.

robharper• 14 years ago

Yes, I think you misunderstood. You are thinking of overriding methods, which is very important. Operator overloading is where you redefine the behavior of a "+" symbol, for example.

rat873• 14 years ago

In a number of oo languages + is a method(smalltalk, ruby, python)(possibly using some sort of special casing of addition for integers/floats to speed up the common cases)/

laktek• 14 years ago

Shameless plug for my Go articles for anyone who wants to get a start - http://laktek.com/tag/go

(Yes, I will commit to finish the rest of the series)

user911302966• 14 years ago

I'm confused. I see the word "engineer" appear several times, but the company appears to offer MP3 recording technology and a "share" button.

Where are the moving parts?

wetbrain• 14 years ago

I've heard the same about Twitter. All they do is publish short messages, why do they have 1000 employees?

There's always many problems that aren't immediately apparent but difficult.

brandoncapecci3• 14 years ago

Why can't people just be satisfied with Ruby or Python...

emmett• 14 years ago

Because this is how progress happens. You could have equally asked about Ruby, why can't people be satisfied with Perl and PHP?

Why would this bother you that they are trying new things and learning?

brandoncapecci3• 14 years ago

Changing languages is not how progress happens. It's only progressive when the long-term benefits of the language outweigh the inefficiency of training all your devs to use it. Assuming that is true for Go (debatable), at the end of the day, SoundCloud still gimps their hiring pool far more than if they choose something like Node. Learning doesn't bother me at all - I like learning - but I can't advocate for battle-testing Go in a mainstream environment when their are plenty of other fast and tested languages. If Go evolves into a language that is more desirable in the everyday stack, that process should be organic, just as it was when people decided to switch to Ruby.

cloudhead• 14 years ago

would that make your day?

brandoncapecci3• 14 years ago

Does it make your day every time you see another unnecessary language or framework on the HN homepage? I'm just as indifferent to those as I am to caring about what SoundCloud does, if not more so.

Go at SoundCloud

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