Ask HN: What are you using Go for?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6985225

by vram22 • 13 years ago

22 39 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm interested in knowing what HNers are doing with Go (other than learning about it, though it would be interesting to hear about learning projects too). Thanks.

charlesdm• 13 years ago

Not using Go in production, but I've been looking at using it for a mobile API for a stateful system (with both a REST and Websocket interface). Seems to be great for realtime system with a lot of different data inputs.

vram2219• 13 years ago

Interesting.

lazyjones2• 13 years ago

After dabbling with it for a couple of weeks, I wrote the backend (search & indexing implementation using the Go standard library's suffix array implementation) of our websites' autocomplete feature. It's been running for 7 months without a crash and without leaking memory, serving several million requests/day.

I'd like to use it more, but we have so many layers of legacy Perl code, that it's difficult to replace single components because of their dependencies (rewriting anything worthwhile would mean rewriting 4-5 libraries also).

vram2219• 13 years ago

Cool ...

workhere-io• 13 years ago

It's been running for 7 months without a crash and without leaking memory, serving several million requests/day.

Sounds cool. What kind of server are you running this on?

lazyjones2• 13 years ago

What kind of server are you running this on?

It runs on a single node of a 4-in-1 supermicro server with dual Opteron 6136 CPUs. Because it uses so little CPU time (about 15% of one core on average), we are now using the server for other things as well ...

bliti3• 13 years ago

As the public entry point towards many internal APIs. Its lighter and faster than any scripting language. Gorilla toolbox made it very easy to write.

vram2219• 13 years ago

Interesting use case.

bliti3• 13 years ago

It was to simplify a rather complicated system that used bots. Each bot would report home by requesting different URLs. That seemed overly complicated to me, because one URI change would break every single bot. I then created the public interface and simplified it to one URI. Then the data structure being sent to the APIs got an additional parameter. It told the public interface which API had to get that data. This was a very simple change, because the data structure was defined by the APIs and common among all. It ended up being very fast and allowed the bots to spend less time waiting for a response. Was planning to add a messaging queue but then I left the project (I was a consultant).

joewalnes2• 13 years ago

This: https://github.com/joewalnes/websocketd

vram2219• 13 years ago

Just checked the github page for it. Looks interesting and useful. Could be used to push system monitoring data to a browser (among tons of other uses, of course). Trying it out ...

vram2219• 13 years ago

Tried websocketd, getting some issue using it. Emailing you about it offline.

joewalnes2• 13 years ago

Here's an example of using it to build a quick Linux system monitoring dashboard: https://github.com/joewalnes/web-vmstats

dkuntz22• 13 years ago

A collaborative music jukebox that lets multiple people listen to the stream over a network. Because cloud-based jukeboxes seem to be all the rage, but none of them let you play music with other people at the same time. We gave it a fun name too: https://github.com/turbowookie/turbo-wookie. Go is used for the HTTP server, and is basically a layer over interacting with MPD.

Also working on a flat-file blogging system with an online editor, because flat-file is the middle ground between a static-site generator and a traditional database-based blogging engine.

vram2219• 13 years ago

Innovative use of Go, I must say.

dkuntz22• 13 years ago

It was a school project. We were the only team to use new technologies. Everyone else used Java or C# (with one group using PHP). Go seemed cool. Dart (which we used for the frontend) also seemed cool.

zachlatta• 13 years ago

I've been using it primarily for a little bit of systems programming and writing internal utilities at work.

vram2219• 13 years ago

Utilities seems like a good use of Go, apart from the others I'm aware of. I mean command-line ones.

dded2• 13 years ago

Utilities seems like a good use of Go

Can you elaborate? I'm unfamiliar with Go, but most of my Python (and Perl, sigh) coding could be classified as "utilities for work". I would have thought that any language with an explicit compile step would be at a disadvantage in this space.

Wezc• 13 years ago

Docker is writing in Go (http://www.docker.io/)

vram2219• 13 years ago

Yes, had seen that some days ago, but thanks.

I had blogged about Docker using LXC, as part of this post about Domino, a Python PaaS for data science:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/12/domino-paas-for-data-scien...

and had seen then that Docker uses Go, though I didn't say so in the post.

Cool.

wilsonfiifi• 13 years ago

Bytengine : https://github.com/johnwilson/bytengine Work in progress but man is Go fun!

vram2219• 13 years ago

Had a quick look at Bytengine. Like the idea of using Linux-like file paths to refer to documents.

Files are JSON documents to which you can attach any binary/text data (docx, txt, pdf, jpeg, etc...).

I'm guessing you store the filename(s) of the attached data (docx, txt, pdf, ...) in the JSON fragment?

blooberr2• 13 years ago

I work with streaming data and Go has been great reducing the number of backend workers (formerly in Ruby) to handle about 1 TB/day in real time. It's very stable and great for building an internal data aggregator.

A friend has also been using Go to create a board game as his side project.

vram2219• 13 years ago

Interesting about the data volume.

What's used for the GUI of the game?

blooberr2• 13 years ago

HTML 5 canvas.

sergiotapia• 13 years ago

I'm using it to scrape a popular gaming API endpoint to get info on hundreds of matches per day. I chose Go because it's fast, easily deployable and I enjoy it. :)

nnash• 13 years ago

Dotabuff? Awesome work if its you.

Ask HN: What are you using Go for?

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