Get Your Development Team Started With Go

https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/get-your-development-team-started-with-go/

by cnbuff410 • 12 years ago

160 122 12 years ago

digitalocean.com

dominotw• 12 years ago

I setup my vim according to plugins described here[1] and go development has been a breeze ever since.

1. http://0value.com/my-Go-centric-Vim-setup

jzelinskie3• 12 years ago

You can basically throw a bunch of that complexity away. This plugin[0] is and one-stop-shop for Go development in vim.

[0] https://github.com/fatih/vim-go

luka-birsa3• 12 years ago

Go Lang was a huge win for us in our server infrastructure. All high performant but hard to maintain C stuff got migrated to Go in 6 months and we never looked back. Code is much more managable, less debugging for memory management, much more readable and shorter by 60%. All that at negligable performance penalties.

For us its a freaking story of awesome success. Go = ROCKS!

easytiger• 12 years ago

So if you had started again in c or cpp you would have ended up with more maintainable shorter code too.

chc• 12 years ago

Probably, but also probably not on the same level. This doesn't seem like a very useful objection, both because it's obvious and because it's very weak.

shurcooL• 12 years ago

This statement is only true if refactoring is not allowed.

luka-birsa3• 12 years ago

Probably true. But it would take us longer, code base would be larger and still harder to maintain and more error prone compared to Go.

It's a very old project and super important core technology - we did refactors before and I was somewhat scepitcal when lead devs on the project suggested to use Go instead for the next "refactor". I was blown away by the quality, speed and productivity.

If you're building server infrastructure that needs to be performant, consider Go.

pjmlp11• 12 years ago

Possible in all languages that offer native code compilers and are more developer friendly than C.

general_failure• 12 years ago

Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Without any more context by grandparent, the parent makes total sense.

libria2• 12 years ago

I didn't read that he was claiming this was exclusive to Go. I prefer we not require a dissertation defending language choice each and every time we have a short anecdote about our experience with it.

Now if he said they had no such luck w/ Java/D/Rust, then perhaps I could understand your ultra defensive fanboi position.

luka-birsa3• 12 years ago

Sure.

But since the post was on topic of Go and we do have quite large Go infrastructure I just wanted to comment that Go is awesome. More people should know about the awesomeness and perhaps experience the same as we did.

mooreds• 12 years ago

Pretty good article on some of the challenges of getting started with Go. Certainly the package management issues point to Go's youth.

I would have loved a more detailed explanation of why they chose Go for a particular problem space rather than C/C++/etc. What problems is Go particularly good for, and for which problems is it a poor choice?

eliben3• 12 years ago

Good article!

HN's reaction to Go reminds me of Stroustrup quote about C++:

..."There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses"

So much complaining about how Go lacks this and that features of shiny new (and sometimes unfinished) language X. In the meantime, as time goes by it seems that more and more real companies use Go code in real production and are quite happy with it, despite all the shortcomings frequently listed here.

eudox• 12 years ago

Thanks for contributing to the gradual destruction of computer science.

eliben3• 12 years ago

Huh what? Care to elaborate?

ecnahc515• 12 years ago

Good thing production software deployment and maintenance has a much smaller focus on computer science theory than real world use cases.

If all business decisions were based on pure computer science we might very well have much better software, but im inclined to believe we wouldn't have so many different and great products out in the world.

dscrd• 12 years ago

If a theoretically weaker programming language is able to destroy computer science, it deserves to be destroyed.

(It isn't of course)

wyager2• 12 years ago

There are also languages that are frequently used, infrequently complained about, and reasonably well designed (like C). I think Stroustrup has an emotional interest in thinking otherwise.

tptacek• 12 years ago

I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that C is infrequently complained about. I think it's more likely that we've just internalized the complaints about C, and that they now go without saying. (C is my favorite language, for whatever it's worth).

eliben3• 12 years ago

C is infrequently complained about? Seriously? The thing with C is, it's been around for >40 years, so all complains have already been rehashed to oblivion. Dozens of "C replacement" languages developed since then stand as a witness to this.

I find some philosophy of C and Go similar, BTW. Minimalism is an art.

bmurphy1976• 12 years ago

You are delirious if you think C is "infrequently" complained about.

kvb7• 12 years ago

It seems like Go is reasonably well designed given its creators' goals, and many people like it, which is great. But I think you're being unfair to (some) critics. It's not that Go is missing "shiny new" features - Go is missing features that have been established for a very long time; generics and sum types have been around for decades and have been proven to work.

And to your last sentence, use in production is not a good measure of language quality (except in a tautological sense), because many non-technical factors strongly affect popularity.

tormeh• 12 years ago

Yeah, but the point of Go is to be minimal and easy. Basically, this makes it really hard to be clever. In both senses, unfortunately, but I see how it can be a net win for big projects.

personZ• 12 years ago

The Go designers clearly had full awareness of every language feature available in alternatives. They consciously and intentionally made the choices they did. This is obvious, of course, but often it is stated as if they came out of a cave, language in hand, unaware of all the great things they were missing.

And to your last sentence, use in production is not a good measure of language quality

It is actually a great indicator of the gap between abstract language tourism, and practical day to day development.

I will say again that Haskell is held as the perfect language and set of choices on here constantly (particularly when used to denigrate Go). Yet it is used for perilously few actual solutions (despite being around for decades).

Sometimes the things that seem incredibly important and of great value just aren't such a great value in the real world. Similarly, things that seem minor end up being very important.

crawshaw2• 12 years ago

Type parameterization has been around for a long time, but all existing implementations make tradeoffs the Go team is not willing to make: http://research.swtch.com/generic

melling• 12 years ago

I'm using DO to hack together some web pages to help me verify data for my mobile app. I'm thinking about building out the pages. However, at the moment I'm using a simple shell script to start.

#!/bin/sh

export PORT=8080 go run go/spanishdb.go go/Html.go

Any good blogs on using Go in a production ready server? Should I run behind Apache?

hedgehog• 12 years ago

Your best bet is probably to put it behind nginx and use something like supervisord to launch the server itself and restart it if it panics (supervisor will also handle log rotation etc).

MoOmer• 12 years ago

Here here for supervisord watching Go behind nginx. I have this set up in production; even using the nginx tcpproxy plugin to reverse proxy some RPC servers.

voidlogic2• 12 years ago

If you want to run Go directly you can use setcap to run it on port 80, without having to run it as root.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14537045/how-i-should-run...

NateDad16• 12 years ago

FYI, you don't need to run go behind anything, the http server can handle thousands of requests per second. Of course you can if you want.

knodi• 12 years ago

People have been poopoo-ing Go lately on HN but let me tell you after using it in production for over a year. It really makes developers life easier. Why?

1) Error handling, Give you ability to impose defensive practices making network or another other I/O failures or unexpected responses from external or internal calls easy to handle.

2) A lot of errors can be caught at compile time. Which means less errors in runtime.

3) It so simple that all of the build in functions and syntax can be expressed in less than 16 lines. Makes reading your code and anyone else code very very easy. Also FMT is sick.

4) Dead simple concurrency.

But all this has still not helped me push Go as the goto lang at the company I work for, why? Sometimes you work with people that just don't want any change.

Give Go a try you'll be shocked how well its designed.

Kiro• 12 years ago

What's the goto lang at your company?

Touche6• 12 years ago

Go is often judged (and praised) based on it's concurrency. But I use map/filter/reduce, etc. far more often than I use concurrency. So no matter how great the concurrency story is, having to use for loops all over my code makes my life much worse.

kyrra3• 12 years ago

This was actually fairly heavily discussed on the Golang mailing list a few months ago[0]. For now I believe the designers of the language would rather keep things as simple as possible. For something that can be done with a fairly simple for-loop, they would rather have you write that out. If there is certain functionality that requires a complex amount of code, the would consider adding either a package to help or changing the language if needed.

[0] https://groups.google.com/d/topic/golang-nuts/RKymTuSCHS0/di...

NateDad16• 12 years ago

Loops make your life worse, really? Loops are trivial code that are nearly impossible to screw up. Writing a loop and writing map/filter probably take nearly the same time. If this is the biggest problem you have in coding, you're luckier than most.

findjashua2• 12 years ago

Same here - weak collections api is the main reason I'm sticking with Python for now.

jzelinskie3• 12 years ago

I think the bit on managing dependencies could be improved with a bit more information about what other people have done. For example, SoundCloud maintains one monolithic $GOPATH in a single git repository that they can then selectively update. My personal preference to any flavor of the month Go dependency managers is gopkg.in[0], because it doesn't fool with the official tool chain (i.e. "go get", "go build"), but still allows for the versioning of packages.

[0] http://labix.org/gopkg.in

sagichmal2• 12 years ago

    > For example, SoundCloud maintains one monolithic $GOPATH 
    > in a single git repository that they can then 
    > selectively update.

No, we tell developers to use a single $GOPATH on their machine, and check out/edit code directly in the canonical location, e.g. $GOPATH/src/github.com/soundcloud/foosvc

emeraldd2• 12 years ago

How do you handle a single developer working on multiple features/branches/issues at the same time?

aaronblohowiak2• 12 years ago

Our GOPATH per project is `pwd`:`pwd`/vendor and in vendor we use a git subtree to a shared repo where we have forked our external dependencies. It isn't great because merging in updates from upstream is annoying, but it is simple and isn't something we have to think about 99% of the time.

jzelinskie3• 12 years ago

Thank you for this clarification. I'm fairly certain I was under that impression due to a misinterpreted description of this system. This does support my point, though, that more people need to discuss this topic. Instead of "generics", "versioning" needs to be the most popular complaint with the language, because it's something that can be standardized in the community.

tkubacki• 12 years ago

I considered both Go and Dart for my new web projects - but as a former C# dev I'm too lazy to live without IDE (debugger intellisense etc) and ended up with Dart. Would love to see more tooling for Go to make it appealing for 'VisualStudio like devs'

pjmlp11• 12 years ago

At least Dart is a kind of modern Smalltalk with more respect for modern language features.

voidlogic2• 12 years ago

Checkout LiteIDE: https://github.com/visualfc/liteide

Binary downloads http://sourceforge.net/projects/liteide/files

jalammar• 12 years ago

Check out IntelliJ IDEA with the Go Plugin.

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

cridenour• 12 years ago

I recently documented [1] my efforts to get a great experience with VIM and Go. It uses vim-go of course, but also supports tags and neocomplete.

[1] https://gist.github.com/cridenour/74e7635275331d5afa6b

sytelus2• 12 years ago

The problem with Go is that it wasn't designed to implement any large projects like C was. So the designers would typically make trade offs on perceived beauty and elegance rather than utility and potential pain in the real world. Another side effect of this is optimizing for compiler simplicity rather than optimizing for expressiveness of the language. It's easy to forget we build compilers not for compiler's sake but for its target user. Here's the quote from Go's history:

we started off with the idea that all three of us had to be talked into every feature in the language, so there was no extraneous garbage put into the language for any reason.

I would also argue C++ started in similar fashion but it went exact opposite route. The balance between minimalism and feature creep can only be achieved if you are designing language as a side effect of building your own large scale project combined with a sense of urgency.

Go is currently a lucky language. There is a huge vacuum that Java has left after Oracle acquisition plus its prolonged stagnation. People who need compiled languages for their relatively new code base, Go would end up becoming their choice regardless of its shortcomings. People will enjoy its minimalism until code base grows to be monster and features starts becoming sorely missed. This is nothing unusual in world of programming languages. We have seen COBOL become a gold standard at one point and PHP is still pretty hot.

NateDad16• 12 years ago

"The problem with Go is that it wasn't designed to implement any large projects"

What? Uh no. That's exactly what it was designed for. Big projects at Google. It has been stated by the creators of Go multiple times.

The simplicity of Go helps in many ways that are not immediately obvious. You always know how memory is laid out in a struct, so you know how much memory you're copying with every instruction. You always know when you're generating garbage, so you can take steps to avoid it when it matters. In general, everything your code tells the computer to do in Go is very obvious, so you can actually reason about what your code does on the small scale and not just on the big scale. And yet, it does this without the added unsafety of C, and without all the enormous complexity of C++. And it does that in a way that you just can't achieve with Java's "everything is an object".

That's why people are flocking to Go. Because it has Java's ease of writing with C's ease of tweaking, and yet fixes a lot of the inherent problems in both languages.

sytelus2• 12 years ago

You should get your facts right:

As per Wikipedia -

Ken Thompson states that, initially, Go was purely an experimental project. Referring to himself along with the other original authors of Go, he states:[11] When the three of us [Thompson, Rob Pike, and Robert Griesemer] got started, it was pure research.

Get Your Development Team Started With Go

Related Stories