Chris Griffing

I'm back again with the second in my series of posts chronicling my adventures as I try different backend languages for writing a simple but real API. Admittedly, I did this quite some time ago and have been slacking when it came to actually writing the blog post. However, I don't think any of the issues I had have changed. (I could be wrong.)

First Impressions

Reading docs and looking at blog posts, the language and syntax was immediately somewhat familiar looking. I love the lack of exceptions. I like tuples. People keep ranting and raving about goroutines. Coming from Rust, it was kind of nice not having to research how I wanted to handle concurrency. With Go, there are just goroutines. No decision to worry about.

Things I Didn't Like

I didn't really have that many problems. The problems I did have, were definitely my own fault. There may have been a pothole or two in the road, but my finger was on the trigger so it was my fault.

For the most part, my biggest problems and issues arose from the use of convention over configuration. The first instance of this was the "workspace". I found that quite annoying. I have heard that this is getting or going to be getting better.

The next issue was the usage of Capitalizing public functions. When I realized that was the issue, someone's remark was "Read the documentation". While valid, it is not a good introduction to the language and I found the documentation poorly organized and laid out compared to Rust.

I think one major way they could improve that is with compiler errors and messaging. For instance, the compiler should have been able to tell me that my module didn't expose a CapitalizedFunction. It could also check if the first letter is capitalized where I am calling it and maybe give me a hint. This is another place where Rust really shined in comparison.

Things I did like

Despite the issues I had above, it still felt like things were going to work out well. I may have been covered in blood but I was starting to understand that I didn't have to like everything about it. Go wasn't there to waste time and play games, it was there to help me be productive.

It might seem like I didn't enjoy my time with Go. That would be a false assumption. There are just so many things that Go does well.

The most confusingly good thing about Go is that despite my issues and bottlenecks I completed it in less time than the Rust implementation. If I had not been spinning my wheels on the convention issues it would have been even quicker.

The places that I found lacking in the core documentation were more than made up for in various resources scattered across the internet. There is also a lot of really cool things being done with Go right now which always makes for interesting reading.

Great standard lib. Rust has a good one too, but I think there is something to be said for a robust standard library. With Rust, you are burdened with choice. There is nothing wrong with that unless you just want to start productively writing code. Go's net/http package is a shining example of the standard lib being the go-to choice for something integral to almost any web api.

Last but not least, goroutines. I see what the hype is about. They are so easy to use. Channels took a minute or two to understand, but not too bad.No lies, I still prefer async...await as a concurrency mechanism, but goroutines are growing on me.

Wrapping Up

Go helped me be very productive and the only cost was feeling like a dork a couple times.

So, is Go my choice for what I want to write backends in for side projects for the foreseeable future? That is a bit hard to say. I think it has a very real place for microservices and it is fast. The ecosystem is also large and growing steadily. (the meetups hosted by Tune are great)

That said, every Go talk I have been to has had to mention the Garbage Collector pause and how they are dealing with it. For the most part, that is a problem most people would love to have because it means you are serving a lot of requests for that to be a real issue. However, when it becomes an issue, I'm not sure how you fix it.