Facebook Go Libraries

by akavel • 12 years ago

227 92 12 years ago

Kiro4• 12 years ago

OT but I think GitHub should show tabs as 4 columns. I find Go code is hard to read with all this whitespace.

tuxone2• 12 years ago

Or better, we should save source code files replacing tabs with spaces. That's the best practice that makes everybody happy.

custardcream3• 12 years ago

Go uses tabs. That's the law. It's in the documentation.

Groups of spaces and tabs are semantically different. Tabs mean indentation. Spaces mean spaces.

halostatue• 12 years ago

The Go team has made the decision that the language supports tabs for indentation, and it’s enforced by `go fmt`.

_ak• 12 years ago

Why? n spaces encode a specific preference for indentation, while tabs just represent a level of indentation. How many columns these actually are is entirely up to personal preference and editor configuration. That's why tabs are always superior for indentation.

boomlinde4• 12 years ago

No, it should show it as tabs, because that's what it is. Ideally, it should show it as 8 column tabs, as that is what gofmt assumes by default.

Kiro4• 12 years ago

Sorry, changed "spaces" to "columns".

ominous_prime5• 12 years ago

I don't think gofmt assumes any width for tabs. It, prints `\t` for indentation, and that's all.

vog• 12 years ago

Actually, you can configure GitHub to do that. Just add ?ts=TABSIZE to the url. For example:

https://github.com/facebookgo/httpcontrol/blob/e815eb2/httpc... (tab size 2)

https://github.com/facebookgo/httpcontrol/blob/e815eb2/httpc... (tab size 4)

https://github.com/facebookgo/httpcontrol/blob/e815eb2/httpc... (tab size 12, seems to be the maximum)

Unfortunately, there seems to be no such entry in the account settings. I'd love to set this value once and for all, or maybe once per file suffix (2 spaces for stuff.xml, 4 spaces for stuff.go).

shurcooL• 12 years ago

I, too, would like to see an entry to set my preference for my account. I prefer tabs of size 4.

In fact, this is the only remaining issue I have left at https://shurcool-legacy.github.io/bettertogether/.

nahname• 12 years ago

Looks more like Naitik Shah's open-source libraries.

akavel• 12 years ago

He seems the main committer there, indeed... but "Naitik Shah's open-source libraries" seem to be present already at: https://github.com/daaku?tab=repositories ... so what is the "facebookgo" thing then?

edit: the files have "Copyright Facebook, Inc." anyway

Shish2k• 12 years ago

I wonder why these aren't under the main facebook account ( https://github.com/facebook ) o_O?

couchand7• 12 years ago

Better organization? Once you start to have more than a few pages of projects on a single group it starts to get very difficult to find them on GitHub unless you know exactly what you're looking for.

twotwotwo• 12 years ago

It gives them more freedom in package names. It's nice when a package name is the same as the last element of the URL, and that URL's reasonably short. And you repeat the package name whenever you use an identifier from the package, so it's good if it's 1) short, and 2) if possible makes the full identifier read nicely à la counting.Reader.

With their own GitHub username, they can just use whatever word they want for the package name (tool, counting, stack, subset, grace, inject) without risking a collision with other Facebook projects.

csmajorfive• 12 years ago

These were all developed on the Parse team. Naitik is a huge contributor :)

I believe we're the only ones doing using Go in production at Facebook. Join us! https://parse.com/about#jobs

harisamin• 12 years ago

Nice. Thanks for open sourcing these libs :)

jzelinskie• 12 years ago

I've heard there are a few other little sprinkles of Go in other places, but no large codebases like this.

tptacek• 12 years ago

This is neat. I like that everything's packaged independently like this.

httpcontrol looks particularly handy:

https://github.com/facebookgo/httpcontrol

chubot• 12 years ago

Is there any repo of Facebook D code? I thought they were making an investment in D. But this is a bit surprising because it seems possible that they use more Go than D.

Dewie3• 12 years ago

Why surprising? I guess they use many different languages. And Go and D are probably sufficiently different to have distinct uses for them.

manacit• 12 years ago

This is not a lot of Go - it's mostly small contained packages for doing useful things. It was also written by the Parse team, who are the only people using Go at FB in production[0].

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8601850

zeebeee2• 12 years ago

I have no idea how to evaluate this, or even tell what it is. Could someone help me out?

I see that it's a bunch of packages, under the heading of "Facebook Go". I assume this is something related to Google's Golang?

I click on "tool" ("Go library that wraps the go tool"). This has a README that points to a documentation link. And that documentation says things like, "Build the Command and return the path to the binary."

So, I guess we're talking about some kind of compiler here? A Golang compiler? How to I get it, how do I use it, and what -- if anything -- does this whole mess have to do with Facebook?

chc3• 12 years ago

The name of the language is Go, not Golang. This is a collection of tools and libraries for Go that Facebook has developed. I don't see any compiler, though one of them wraps the Go tool that is used to compile Go programs.

codemac• 12 years ago

I've been working with go for the past year, and let me tell you - golang is king when it comes to google's own search engine queries.

You're right it's not the proper name that the go language team at google assigned, but it's certainly the colloquial (and notably more unique) one.

zeebeee2• 12 years ago

Thanks!

This is a collection of tools and libraries for Go that Facebook has developed.

How did you figure that out? (And thus, in the future, how can I figure it out?)

autarch4• 12 years ago

The crappy documentation is very much in line with many Go libraries, sadly. There doesn't seem to be a great culture of documentation. People often just write bare API docs without explaining why the library is useful or showing a lot of examples.

yvsong• 12 years ago

It may be a cultural difference of system programmers (including Go designers and developers) and (consumer) application programmers (e.g., as in the Apple camp). System programmers regard themselves higher, prefer terse symbol names, specs, docs, mathematical expressions, and formal methods, don't seem fans of Objective C or Java style readability and verbosity. But then again, it's open source software -- No one owes anyone anything.

djhworld• 12 years ago

Never experienced this, godoc https://godoc.org/ is a good resource

jvehent3• 12 years ago

This is the first time I see a patent file in an open source project [1] and now I know I won't use this until my lawiers take a look at it. Sad world...

[1] https://github.com/facebookgo/runcmd/blob/master/patents

autarch4• 12 years ago

Well, if you read the file you'd see that it's a grant of rights to use this software regardless of any patents Facebook has that may apply to said software.

It looks to be more or less the same as the relevant clause in the Apache 2.0 license that says "you can use our patents but if you sue us your right to use this software is automatically revoked."

jvehent3• 12 years ago

...and the Apache 2.0 license belongs to a short list of licenses that have been extensively reviewed and can be trusted.

Every time someone comes up with a new license, the review work must be redone to ensure it respects the philosophy of Open Source. Which is why I prefer project published under well-known licenses (GPL2/3, LGPL, Apache, Mozilla, BSD, ...).

DannyBee2• 12 years ago

"Well, if you read the file you'd see that it's a grant of rights to use this software regardless of any patents Facebook has that may apply to said software.

It looks to be more or less the same as the relevant clause in the Apache 2.0 license that says "you can use our patents but if you sue us your right to use this software is automatically revoked." "

It 100% is not the same as Apache.

1. If you challenge any facebook patent's validity, at all, you lose the right to use the software. Apache has no such clause. (This is the "(b) that any right in any patent claim of Facebook is invalid or unenforceable.")

2. Apache is a tit for tat clause (for lack of a better term). If you have apache licensed software X, and sue someone about patents in X, you lose any granted patent rights to X. You keep rights to other software.

In Facebook's wording, if you have facebook software X, and sue Facebook about software Y, you lose granted patent rights to X.

The breadth is not the problem though. I'm perfectly fine with folks trying to prevent others from suing them.

However, this broad clause also applies to counter claims.

So if facebook sues you, and you counter claim, at all, you lose patents rights to all facebook software.

I actually know they have their good reasons to want to do this, but it is not a simple "you should feel good about this" type of situation.

btian• 12 years ago

Why is it sad? If you're big enough to have lawyers on the payroll, it doesn't take that much effort to have them take a look.

If you're not big enough, then it probably doesn't affect you anyway.

jvehent3• 12 years ago

If you're not big enough, then it probably doesn't affect you anyway.

How so?

stesch• 12 years ago

Wow, Facebook sure uses a lot of languages. PHP, Hack, C++, Erlang, OCaml, D, Go, JavaScript, …

nuclear_eclipse• 12 years ago

... Python, ...

Facebook Go Libraries

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