Go as an alternative to Node.js for very fast servers

http://bbs.studygolang.com/thread-278-1-1.html

by g0lden • 13 years ago

176 162 13 years ago

bbs.studygolang.com

crncosta• 13 years ago

Here is the original link: http://blog.safariflow.com/2013/02/22/go-as-an-alternative-t...

616c3• 13 years ago

So beyond the ironic comment mentioned before with the Golang Hello world tutorial using Chinese, what is the real reason behind the Chinese following behind Go?

It seems like this site confirm there must be a pretty dedicated Golang following, but I cannot figure out for the life of me why. Does anyone actually know?

samnardoni• 13 years ago

For me, Go has the least "What the hell does this code do?" and "Why isn't this code working?" of any language I've ever used.

I'd say Go isn't an impressive programming language, but a very impressive software engineering language.

bsg75• 13 years ago

Go isn't an impressive programming language, but a very impressive software engineering language.

Curious, what is the distinction?

siddhant• 13 years ago

Not necessarily. I suppose the hello world tutorial shows hello world in Chinese mostly to show Unicode. And as for this link, this is just an external link (http://blog.safariflow.com/2013/02/22/go-as-an-alternative-t...) that someone posted on a forum. Things like these happen on every forum in every country.

616c3• 13 years ago

Yeah, not sure what happened but this was the link below a few minutes ago.

http://bbs.studygolang.com/thread-278-1-1.html

Notice that, despite English content, the forum looks Chinese-language oriented. I think it is cool, but not normal to me.

justincormack• 13 years ago

There was some discussion here but no OK me seems to know more https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6161399

freyr• 13 years ago

Your original comment:

They seem to be making a concerted effort to make Go Chinese friendly https://code.google.com/p/go-zh/

The Chinese fork seems to be a project started by Minux. Minux (Shenghou Ma) is a Go contributer and is very active in the Go community, but he does not work for Google, as far as I know.

corresation7• 13 years ago

Do you mean specifically why there is a dedicated Chinese following in particular, or just in general?

Go is a clean, intuitive language with a very robust supporting ecosystem and a strong concurrency model. It builds fast, small code and makes quick work of big problems. Why shouldn't there be a big following of one of the better platforms to come out in a long time?

agentultra• 13 years ago

My only gripe is its intended use as a systems programming language.

The runtime kind of makes it a silo; ie: hard to bind other languages to it through an FFI.

Of course if I am mistaken or there's something being done to address such a scenario then I will be much happier seeing more and more infrastructure code shipping in Go.

fredsanford3• 13 years ago

Maybe because a lot of choice has been removed from the system? I've worked with a bunch of people from different countries and find that the more strict the gov't, the less they like choice, in general. All anecdotal of course...

Giving one guy from the Ukraine the typical choices at a restaurant here in the US would freeze him in place.

    What would you like to drink?  Tea

    Sweetened or Unsweetened?  Sweet. frustration += 1

    Sugar or artificial sweetener.  Sugar.  frustration += 2

    Soup or Salad?  Soup.  frustration += 7

    Which soup?  Minestrone, Pasta Fagioli, Italian Wedding?  frustration += 14

and on and on... Ukraine started packing his lunch.

Then there was the guy from Iceland... He took 10+ minutes to decide what to order in a new place and once he figured out what he liked in a particular place, he never gave the waitstaff a chance to offer him a choice. This, well done, salad with x dressing, with unsweetened tea. Iceland liked making the choices but only a few times.

Some people like to be dictated to: Code will be formatted like this. Braces will be like this. etc. The author of the article thinks these are a feature while I find it obnoxious.

My brain requires braces to line up in the left column, anything else slows me down. Maybe I'm just old?

mr_luc• 13 years ago

Off-topic on the subject of restaurants:

I use the ML approach of combining other people's algorithms. :)

My first time in a new place, I'm usually with friends, and I imitate their orders. On the rare times when I'm not, I ask the waiter what the favorite plates of he/the other people in the restaurant are, what they order when they eat there.

This way even my initial orders are lightning-fast and already judged as 'tasty' in comparison to other offerings. And over time, I can investigate other plates for myself.

asabjorn• 13 years ago

It does not make sense to group peoples reaction to choice like this. As a counter example Apple products are very popular in the USA and other Western Countries, and Apple does not give you many choices.

redbad• 13 years ago

    > My brain requires braces to line up in the left column, 
    > anything else slows me down. Maybe I'm just old?

One amazing property of humans is our ability to re-shape ourselves in new environments; to literally learn new tricks. The handicap you identify here is only serving to diminish your potential.

Jhsto• 13 years ago

If you meant the Hello World example, it is probably because the board game Go originates from China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)

prewett• 13 years ago

I doubt it. If I recall the example correctly, it was "Hello, 世界!" Since "世界" means "world" the example is really the same "Hello, world!" example from C, only with one of the words changed to something that clearly requires Unicode. That was certainly my reaction when I saw the example: "oh, good, easy Unicode support"

I expect the choice of Chinese as the language is probably the fact that you can't play code page games very easily with Chinese, which you could with Korean, Arabic, etc. It is probably the most widely spoken language with a non-Latin character set. Also, chances are very good that a Chinese-writing colleague of the example writer was readily available. Although, who knows, it would be fun if it were because of the board game.

munimkazia• 13 years ago

If you read the original blog post on http://blog.safariflow.com/2013/02/22/go-as-an-alternative-t..., one of the commentators actually attempted the comparison between node.js and go, and his results for node.js was significantly faster.

axaxs• 13 years ago

Go version 1.1 was more than a significant increase in net handling speed.

bhauer5• 13 years ago

Not only that, but although the particular test described in the linked blog post did not include database connectivity, we saw a massive increase in database performance in 1.1 versus 1.0.2 due to a fix in the sql package [1]. That was back in Round 4 of our project [2].

Just something to be aware of if anyone reading has Go 1.0.2 installed and has not yet upgraded. 1.1 is worth the upgrade.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/go/source/detail?r=45c12efb46

[2] http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/05/02/frameworks-round-...

bhauer5• 13 years ago

Thanks for the link to the original. Perhaps "February 22, 2013" should be identified in the title here?

That explains the use of Go 1.0.2.

MatthewPhillips• 13 years ago

Is it possible to write Go in a functional way? Are there first class functions? Anonymous functions? If so it seems it would be possible to write highly functional code given the flexibility of interface{}

lmm• 13 years ago

Up to a point, but go's limited datatypes make it difficult to write the kind of code you're used to writing in haskell/f#/etc.

payload4• 13 years ago

A haskell version with the Warp server performs just a little bit worse than the go version (6 secs vs 7 secs) with a little bigger minimal latency (68 ms vs 71 ms).

  go version go1.0.2
  runghc 7.6.2
  cabal packages of today

Runned with "runhaskell main.hs" on localhost over loopback :)

  import qualified Network.Wai as Wai
  import qualified Network.Wai.Handler.Warp as Warp
  import qualified Network.HTTP.Types as HTTP
  import qualified Data.ByteString as ByteString
  import Blaze.ByteString.Builder.ByteString (fromByteString)
  
  main = do
      let port = 8000
      Warp.run port app
  
  app req = do
      let n = 1024*1024
      let bytes = fromByteString $ ByteString.replicate n 100
      return $ Wai.ResponseBuilder HTTP.status200 [] bytes

dons• 13 years ago

It is monomorphically typed, however, which limits the use of higher-order functions.

zemo• 13 years ago

there are first class functions, and closures work the way you would expect. Since it's statically typed and there are no generics, there's no way to implement something like a left fold; you'd have to implement it on a per-type basis, but you could certainly do that. I believe the answer you're looking for is "no", but Go's functions are nothing to sneeze at. http://jordanorelli.tumblr.com/post/42369331748/function-typ...

masklinn5• 13 years ago

you'd have to implement it on a per-type basis

Alternatively you can implement everything on interface{} and force the user of the higher-order function to use type assertions everywhere.

masklinn5• 13 years ago

Are there first class functions? Anonymous functions?

Yes.

If so it seems it would be possible to write highly functional code given the flexibility of interface{}

Not really, you'd have to add type assertions everywhere as go has neither generic functions nor user-defined generic types (only a handful of special-status types get to have type parameters, IIRC they're chans, arrays, slices and maps). That makes higher-order operations extremely cumbersome.

I'm also uncertain whether scalars (e.g. integral types) can be used through interface{}.

pcwalton• 13 years ago

I'm also uncertain whether scalars (e.g. integral types) can be used through interface{}.

They can (and there are optimizations to avoid heap allocation in some cases when you do use them), but you still have to write downcasts everywhere.

miloshadzic• 13 years ago

It seems to me that Go is incredibly crappy for writing in a functional style. Have a look at Rust if that's what you're after.

eblume• 13 years ago

I wrote a library for Go that makes functional programming with channels-as-streams very comfortable, for me[1]. There is a problem with needing to box and unbox variables from the 'empty interface{}' type all the time but it's a minor wart IMO.

It's a really small library that was made in response to my own intuition (similar to yours) that the Go standard library wasn't really embracing a functional style. I haven't used it in any major projects but for small one-off things it's proved pretty useful. It basically works like pipes on the command line.

1: https://github.com/eblume/proto

burntsushi• 13 years ago

If you're interested, I did an in depth write up on how to do it. [1]

[1] http://blog.burntsushi.net/type-parametric-functions-golang

AndyKelley6• 13 years ago

I did the benchmarks outlined at the end of the article.

Summary of results:

1. Node.js v0.10.15, single worker: 46.2 seconds

2. Node.js v0.10.15, cluster 8 workers using naught: 17.2 seconds

3. Go 1.0.2, GOMAXPROCS left default: 3.5 seconds

4. Go 1.0.2, GOMAXPROCS=8: 3.7 seconds

Detailed results below:

1. Node.js v0.10.15, single worker

  Concurrency Level:      100
  Time taken for tests:   46.217 seconds
  Complete requests:      10000
  Failed requests:        0
  Write errors:           0
  Total transferred:      10486510000 bytes
  HTML transferred:       10485760000 bytes
  Requests per second:    216.37 [#/sec] (mean)
  Time per request:       462.168 [ms] (mean)
  Time per request:       4.622 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
  Transfer rate:          221580.08 [Kbytes/sec] received
  
  Connection Times (ms)
                min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
  Connect:        0    0   0.2      0       3
  Processing:   193  461  36.2    450     944
  Waiting:       16  235 127.3    235     534
  Total:        193  461  36.2    450     944
  
  Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
    50%    450
    66%    467
    75%    470
    80%    486
    90%    492
    95%    514
    98%    517
    99%    545
   100%    944 (longest request)

2. Node.js v0.10.15, cluster 8 workers using naught

  Concurrency Level:      100
  Time taken for tests:   17.199 seconds
  Complete requests:      10000
  Failed requests:        0
  Write errors:           0
  Total transferred:      10486510000 bytes
  HTML transferred:       10485760000 bytes
  Requests per second:    581.41 [#/sec] (mean)
  Time per request:       171.995 [ms] (mean)
  Time per request:       1.720 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
  Transfer rate:          595408.80 [Kbytes/sec] received

  Connection Times (ms)
                min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
  Connect:        0    0   0.2      0       3
  Processing:     7  171 116.4    149     739
  Waiting:        5   96  81.9     71     710
  Total:          8  171 116.5    150     740

  Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
    50%    150
    66%    197
    75%    236
    80%    266
    90%    324
    95%    397
    98%    438
    99%    493
   100%    740 (longest request)

3. Go 1.0.2, GOMAXPROCS left default

  Concurrency Level:      100
  Time taken for tests:   3.542 seconds
  Complete requests:      10000
  Failed requests:        0
  Write errors:           0
  Total transferred:      10486730000 bytes
  HTML transferred:       10485760000 bytes
  Requests per second:    2823.16 [#/sec] (mean)
  Time per request:       35.421 [ms] (mean)
  Time per request:       0.354 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
  Transfer rate:          2891181.71 [Kbytes/sec] received

  Connection Times (ms)
                min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
  Connect:        0    1   0.3      1       3
  Processing:     9   35   2.2     34      56
  Waiting:        0    1   1.3      1      22
  Total:         12   35   2.3     35      57

  Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
    50%     35
    66%     36
    75%     36
    80%     36
    90%     37
    95%     38
    98%     39
    99%     41
   100%     57 (longest request)

4. Go 1.0.2, GOMAXPROCS=8

  Concurrency Level:      100
  Time taken for tests:   3.657 seconds
  Complete requests:      10000
  Failed requests:        0
  Write errors:           0
  Total transferred:      10486730000 bytes
  HTML transferred:       10485760000 bytes
  Requests per second:    2734.54 [#/sec] (mean)
  Time per request:       36.569 [ms] (mean)
  Time per request:       0.366 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
  Transfer rate:          2800429.67 [Kbytes/sec] received

  Connection Times (ms)
                min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
  Connect:        0    1   0.4      1       3
  Processing:    19   36   2.5     35      57
  Waiting:        0    1   1.1      1      16
  Total:         20   37   2.5     36      58

  Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
    50%     36
    66%     37
    75%     37
    80%     37
    90%     38
    95%     39
    98%     42
    99%     51
   100%     58 (longest request)

hackerboos• 13 years ago

What tool are you using for your benchmarks?

AndyKelley6• 13 years ago

apache benchmark. I did exactly what the article suggested to benchmark.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/programs/ab.html

corresation7• 13 years ago

Try with GOMAXPROCS set to the number of real cores on your test machine (e.g. ignore hyperthread cores).

AndyKelley6• 13 years ago

OK I did GOMAXPROCS=4. 3.6 seconds Node cluster count 4: 17.5 seconds

thrownaway24245• 13 years ago

What do you think the difference is between a "real core" and a "hyperthread core"?

bigdubs• 13 years ago

There were significant performance increases in Go 1.10 (see:http://golang.org/doc/go1.1#performance), I would also suggest you benchmark a more current version.

melling2• 13 years ago

How much of an advantage, if any, does Node provide because it's more "mature", or at least has been used for far longer.

For example, when I go to StackOverFlow I see that Node has far more questions asked:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/go

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/node.js

bsaul2• 13 years ago

I'm really uncertain about node being judged more "mature".

Being developed by Thompson and Pike makes you gain something like 30 years of "maturity". Plus, running in production in the Google infrastructure is far more of a proof of maturity than running the chat service of every hackathon project for 2 years.

flogic• 13 years ago

By now, I'd assume the language run times are in the noise for thinking about maturity. The most likely culprits will be the application code followed by the library code. So the real question should be "Are there any big scary monsters in the libraries I need?". Followed by "Which language do I think will best enable me to hit my target?".

trimbo• 13 years ago

If this is your requirement, may I suggest:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java

lnanek2• 13 years ago

Much more so than internet posts about it, there are countless modules for NodeJS as well. Need to upload and store and return images in Monogo using streaming? Done. Need to keep servers running despite errors? Done. Amazon S3? Done. Need an alternate cloud provider? Done. Need login using OAUTH/OpenID/whatever? Done. On and on. Most times you need some general purpose web functionality, there's already a couple Node modules in that area, if not an entire framework or sample app and tutorial targeted at that area.

toong• 13 years ago

Test nr 3 sends a whopping 2891 Mbytes/s over http ? I know it's localhost, but wow ?!

voidlogic5• 13 years ago

When I see someone doing something like this and:

  1. They are not using the latest Go (atm 1.1.2)
  2. GOMAXPROCS is not = the number of CPUs
  3. They are using ab rather than something more scalable like wrk

I assume they either don't know what they are doing, or want to make Go look bad.

On a side note, Go is already known to be much faster at web-serving than node.js: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r6&hw=i7...

AndyKelley6• 13 years ago

I did the test that the article suggested, with the versions of the tools that I have installed on my system. This is a comment on a blog article, not an attempt to engineer the perfect benchmark.

Also in this bench Go danced circles around node. I dunno what you're complaining about.

razorsese• 13 years ago

Why is this faster?

https://gist.github.com/jdpaton/9f20ff0b13e0cc20017a

arh68• 13 years ago

I did find this bit:

  // When calling .end(buffer) right away, this triggers a "hot path"
  // optimization in http.js, to avoid an extra write call.
  //
  // However, the overhead of copying a large buffer is higher than
  // the overhead of an extra write() call, so the hot path was not
  // always as hot as it could be.
  //
  // Verify that our assumptions are valid.

https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/benchmark/http/en...

rartichoke6• 13 years ago

That test is rigged to be a best case scenario for Go. How often do you send 1MB responses down to the client?

If you send 3KB responses then you would see both setups are much closer in performance.

Factor in some actual I/O and the difference will be even less. Then you'll eventually realize using either one makes little difference when it comes to performance.

This is why micro benchmarks are pure jokes. A real world site has a mix of response sizes, database I/O and caching. It's the only way to test something properly and you'll see if you properly test both there will be little difference in performance.

redneckbeard2• 13 years ago

Original author of the post in question here.

Please note that the microbench was "rigged" by the author of Node when he was first presenting it several years ago (spelled out in the article).

If you need a tl;dr, it's this: I don't care for JavaScript as a language. Many make the argument that JavaScript should be adopted widely server-side because of its speed. I assert that languages should be evaluated not only for performance but for maintainability, feature sets, standard library, etc. Go provides a great combination of execution speed, development speed, and ease of maintainability.

rartichoke6• 13 years ago

The development speed isn't very good with Go because you have to re-invent almost everything yourself because the web libs are seriously years behind other platforms.

The default template language is also really archaic and no one has created a solid alternative yet that's actually well tested and used by the masses.

It might have good execution speed and the language itself might be nice but the only thing that matters is going from point A to point B. Go will not get you there faster than other languages and the execution speed is a non-issue for pretty much every platform (even rails) if you use tools available to you to their fullest.

P.S., I compared Go to Node almost a year ago and even wrote a mini framework for Go to resemble a smaller version of Express. I eventually just said fk it and stopped because the gains were not even close to being worth it.

thedufer• 13 years ago

At the very least, calling 50% more lines a "similar line count" is disingenuous. 5 extra lines doesn't look like much, but on a typical multi-thousand line codebase, you're looking at thousands of extra lines.

dccoolgai• 13 years ago

Right...and you have the benefits of npm with node. AFAIK, there is nothing comparable with Go... and frankly, even the Go code in that terse example takes more lines and isn't as readable (IMHO) as the Node server...

swah• 13 years ago

Go doesn't mean just fast for me; in that space there is also the JVM. To me, it fits the fast and lean and easy to deploy space.

tensor2• 13 years ago

The headline of this article bothered me in this regard. Node.js is decidedly middle of the pack in terms of performance:

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

In addition to various JVM technologies, there are faster technologies in C++, PHP, and Lua.

pekk• 13 years ago

I think you will find that in many actual applications PHP is not faster than Node.

Further, once you apply a framework to paper over some language warts, performance is often terrible and can only be rescued by extremely liberal caching.

If this were not so, it would be hard to see the motivation for HipHop.

cgag3• 13 years ago

What's easier about deploying Go vs with the JVM? Deploying stuff I've written in Clojure has been pretty easy.

threeseed2• 13 years ago

It's more your 'typical' Java app.

Which is often the huge array of JARs and folder structure you typically need to bootstrap.

pallinder• 13 years ago

go build

It compiles a binary, just send it to the server and it will run, no need to even have go installed on the server (or any libs really).

markuskobler• 13 years ago

Are these trivial micro benchmarks, (simply respond with an empty 200) not totally misleading to focus on? Especially when you start to factor in many real workloads that involve disk or network io.

ilaksh• 13 years ago

Its not empty because its 1mb but it is misleading because in the original article someone's comment showed Node going much faster than Go. If it were empty then Node would be faster because you can get 4000 req per sec if its empty. I think something weird is going on though because it should be more than 300 per sec with the new Node version even if its 1mb.

Morphling• 13 years ago

I know this post is about speed, but you should always remember that with node.js you only need JS developers while with Go you are probably going to need both Go and JS (for front-end stuff) developers.

Just my two cents.

cenhyperion• 13 years ago

Or developers that are comfortable with both JS and Go.

gtaylor• 13 years ago

At the same token, having frontend JS devs that don't have much experience in writing backends can leave you with a mess to clean up or completely re-write in the future.

I think this "benefit" of using the same language for front and backend is pretty over-hyped, as well. In theory, I can agree that it sounds good. In practice, use the best tool for the job on both ends to fit your team's abilities and strengths.

The other neat thing is that if your frontend and UI are cleanly separated, you can swap them out individually without the other even noticing. If our backend gets to be too sluggish, I can replace it with something lower level gradually over time (Go?) without leaving a bunch of deprecated backend JS cruft to clean out.

purplelobster• 13 years ago

As a single developer on a project, I use js on the front-end, NodeJS and CouchDB (views written in js). This means that every step of the way is js, json and http, which is extremely liberating for me, as someone who's just starting out with web development.

ef4• 13 years ago

I have a rich, client-side, fully-offline-capable javascript application. I started out with a different language for the backend, but over time the benefit of switching to Node and sharing one codebase became overwhelming.

Just to give one example: any data query can get answered locally or from the server, depending on what's already cached and whether you're online. Before, I had to implement every call twice and make sure they stayed in sync. Now I can implement once and run the same code in both places.

And other interesting possibilities open up. The server can just run the client's data synchronization code to pull changes from another server, giving realtime server-to-server replication nearly "for free".

thezilch3• 13 years ago

Nay. You're going to need both backend (routing, security, caching, HTTP, more caching, SQL/ORM/whatever, MVC, search/document stores, etc) developers and frontend (HTML, CSS, HTML5 (Re: "the hard stuff"), AJAX/JSONP/CORS/whatever). Off the cuff, knowing another language is going to be very little of the overhead, especially when you consider one side is dealing with local services and the other is dealing with mostly DOM (or using some library / "another language" to view the DOM in another light).

ebiester4• 13 years ago

I am a "full stack" developer. I know the ins and outs of both my front and back end stacks (Groovy in my case), and I have a pretty good sense of the patterns required in this case.

However, one of the more frustrating pieces of this is that I never dive deep into one paradigm. I'm continually having to work bilingually. When I was working with node.js, I didn't feel nearly as much bilingual stress (even though I've written backends in python, ruby, java, groovy, and scala!)

As such, my single person one-off and side projects will be in node.js. It's about cognitive overhead in the moment. I agree that it's a mediocre solution for larger teams and enterprise is not its sweet spot, but it's great for projects in the small.

diminoten3• 13 years ago

There's a school of thought in software dev that a developer is a developer is a developer, and should be able to do all the things a developer should do.

That said, you hire "backend-focused" developers, "front-end" developers, etc., but to me that still means they should be able to do whatever tasks are necessary (Go, JS) to get their job done.

invisible2• 13 years ago

I've worked with both node and Go. There is a lot of hyperbole and fluff points about Go's strengths in the original article (sorry to the author!). Things that are touted as huge wins for Go have equally better things in node. Both platforms are great and they both have appeal for different people.

My eloquent post was eaten by an expired link on the original article but here are some counter-points:

The commutative property applies to all code that has semicolons to end lines. Use jslint/jshint/an IDE. The symbol is "optional" not marked as "leave it out because it makes scripts nicer."

Use jslint/jshint/an IDE to prevent globals. Seriously. It's the same as running go fmt on your code.

Forcing people to use "channels" as a best practice to accomplish scaling is the same as the best practice of callbacks - but yes, channels are nicer to use. Node standard modules require callbacks by default as Go standard library implements channels by default.

32-bit integers in JS don't have float problems because the precision doesn't break

Typing in Go can still be annoying for some situations. If you're dealing with external content (creating an API with mutable content that you still need to read) it can be annoying at best (e.g. reminds me of writing C). Types in Go are a nice implementation though.

npm is way better than go get and there are at least 3 projects in Go trying to replicate npm's ease-of-use

The vim/emacs syntax highlighter is nice but it's awfully frustrating if you don't use vim/emacs. This is due to Go's young age, but you shouldn't be forced into using a certain editor to get syntax highlighting.

The alternative to "go fmt" for Javascript is a good IDE or jslint/jshint.

In Go, you get a lot in the standard library, but you miss out on a lot in the community. Yet another young language problem, you wind up having to roll your own for a lot of things that should just exist. It can be frustrating looking for answers because you might be the first person working on the problem in the language.

Also, just as a general thing I've perceived, people seem to argue static types vs dynamic types more than that a particular language is "better." Go and JS/node are both great!!!! Go is typed, JS is not and you deal with the consequences in both situations. Static typed languages have big faults with external data handling that sometimes cripple features (or makes them far more difficult to accomplish). Dynamic typed languages can fall victim to variables being used incorrectly (especially when not using an IDE). That's the biggest bulk of the difference in my experience.

drsintoma5• 13 years ago

Typing in Go can still be annoying for some situations. If you're dealing with external content (creating an API with mutable content that you still need to read) it can be annoying at best (e.g. reminds me of writing C). Types in Go are a nice implementation though.

Indeed, that's probably the biggest flaw I've found working with GO's type system. Trying to work with unknown n-level JSON is real pain.

chimeracoder• 13 years ago

I'm not entirely sure what problem you're referring to here, but I wrote a tool to enable with mapping JSON to native Go types: https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/gojson . Basically, you specify the narrowest possible type that covers all expected (valid) inputs.

If your JSON is effectively "strongly typed" (most APIs are), this is going to be a huge win for you.

If your JSON is not, then you'll have a problem in any statically typed language (not just Go), because you need some way to reason about the type. You'll also have the same problem with dynamically typed languages as well - the main difference is that Go will never do implicit casts (I would view this as a good thing).

I've done a lot of work in Go involving JSON (that's originally why I wrote the above tool - to save myself time), and in practice, it's rare that I have to do anything more than decode, check for an error[0], and then move on.

[0] Which is something everyone should do in all languages, not just Go - once you've confirmed that there is no error, you rid yourself of a lot of possible bugs that could pop up later on in harder-to-discover places.

pbsd• 13 years ago

32-bit integers in JS don't have float problems because the precision doesn't break

Unless you try multiplying them.

invisible2• 13 years ago

As long as the result is less than 9007199254740992 (9 quadrillion; 2^53). Who uses numbers that large? Regardless of the practicality, you can use a library if you need support for bigger numbers (e.g. crypto's BigInt.js).

samstave• 13 years ago

If I am starting from zero, which is easier to lear/better to learn; Go or Node?

WalterSear• 13 years ago

Node and javascript. Vastly more learning resources and applicability at this time.

lloeki• 13 years ago

Also, Go as an alternative to <whatever> for very slow servers. I use Go on my Pi and the thing flies.

sandGorgon• 13 years ago

Did you compare with a JVM toolkit with similar concurrency libraries like Akka/Scala?

Am curious to find out the results. There was a recent, don't remember which, comparison that put Scala way ahead of Go possibly because of a superior GC.

Wonder if the results correlate

jambay• 13 years ago

I think there is a typo in the go sample program.

bytes = 100

Should be

bytes[i] = 100

Right or wrong?

erper• 13 years ago

you're right. unless i really don't understand Go code.

Chris2048• 13 years ago

I'd like to see go compared to netty as well. Is there a good place for this kind of thing, SO obviously doesn't care for it.

Go as an alternative to Node.js for very fast servers

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