Go - A Key Language in Enterprise Application Development?

@classyhacker
Go - a key language in

enterprise application development?
Aarti Parikh, Engineering Manager@PayPal

QCon SF 2018

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go-lang-design

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@classyhacker
Go’s popularity in the last few years is hard to miss. It
has jumped up in the Tiobe index and is holding steady.
The language has had a signiﬁcant impact on the startup
scene due to its simplicity, speed and enabling
productivity in engineering teams. Large companies are
starting to take notice. We also see a huge amount of
community involvement in Go. If you have lived through
the growth of Java in the late 90’s, this feels a bit like
déjà vu. In this talk, I will go over the Go language
design and talk about why Go matters in the age of
multicores and cloud-native computing.

@classyhacker
Enterprise languages
• Java is by far the most popular

• C#/.Net

• JavaScript for web development

• Python, Ruby, NodeJS for Web, Scripting and Devops

@classyhacker
An enterprise language should
• Be easy to learn,

• Be easy to read, debuggable

• Be safe

• Be stable

• Scale on modern hardware with multi core processors

• Have good tooling

• Dependency management

• Scale across teams with diverse skills

• Be easy to deploy

• Have a strong community

• Have good libraries

@classyhacker
Java
• Was created to replace C++

• Write once run anywhere was ground breaking

• Developer productivity

• Static type checking

• Steady growth - ﬁrst release 1995

• Garbage collection, memory safety allowed focus on business logic

• Stable JVM and continuously improving performance

• Java 2 -> Java 5(Generics)-> Java 8(Lambda)

• Has been backward compatible with every release

• Libraries helped developers hit the ground running

• Easy to learn

• Cheaper development costs

@classyhacker
Growth of Java
• Browser applets to Server side

• J2EE to SOA, Web Services, lots of XML

• ORM’s, JBoss Marc Fleury

• JUnit + Xtreme programming, Kent Beck

• Design Patterns, Refactoring, Martin Fowler

• IDE support, Eclipse eco-system, IntelliJ

• Dependency Injection, Spring, AOP

• Dependency management, Maven

• JMS, Active MQ, Message Oriented Middleware

@classyhacker
Java problems
• Developer velocity plateaued

• Verbose, Tedious, Repetitive

• Epitome of OOP

• Slow startups times with JBoss, Spring Boot to the rescue

• Oracle taking over Java, license worries

• JVM abstraction - Developers unaware of how their code is
running

• Concurrency (OS threads map to Java Threads)

@classyhacker
Scripting languages for web dev
• Javascript/NodeJS/Express

• Ruby/Ruby on Rails

• Python/Django

• PHP/Laravel

@classyhacker
Rise of Frameworks
• Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, EventMachine

• Express, Meteor, Hapi, Sails, Lodash…

• Django, Twisted

• Succeeding due to community work

@classyhacker
Discontent
• Framework fatigue

• Dependency fatigue

• Vulnerabilities

• Single Threaded

• Global interpretor lock

• Callback hell

• Build tools are slow

• Need a book for the good parts

@classyhacker
FP on the JVM
• Clojure - 2007

• Scala - 2004

• Expensive development cost

• Hard to learn

• Better concurrency

• Enterprise adoption is limited

• FP purists

• Community

@classyhacker
Creators
Robert Griesemer

(V8 engine, Java Hotspot VM, Chubby)

Rob Pike

(Unix Team & Plan9 & UTF-8)

Ken Thompson

(Unix)

@classyhacker
Did the C++ committee really believe that what was
wrong with C++ was that it didn't have enough
features? - Rob Pike

@classyhacker
Robert: Starting point: C, fix some obvious flaws, remove
crud, add a few missing features.
Rob: name: 'go'. you can invent reasons for this name but it
has nice properties. it's short, easy to type. tools: goc, gol,
goa. if there's an interactive debugger/interpreter it could
just be called 'go'. the suffix is .go.
Robert Empty interfaces: interface {}. These are
implemented by all interfaces, and thus this could take the
place of void*.
In the end of course it came out quite different
from either C or C++

@classyhacker
Simple
• 25 keywords

• Feel like Ruby, Runs like C

• Readability is Paramount - Rob Pike

• Simple code is debuggable

• Simple can be expressive

• Can scale on large codebases with developer churn

@classyhacker
Stable
Go 1.11 Release notes
There are no changes to the language spec.
There are no signiﬁcant changes to the language spec.
There are 2 changes the Language spec.
There is 1 change in the Language spec.

@classyhacker
Design
• Natively compiled

• Statically typed

• Open source

• Garbage collected

• CSP Concurrency

• Fast compile times

@classyhacker
Q. Why is my trivial program
such a large binary?
➔ ls -l
total 3144
-rwxr-xr-x 1 aarti staff 1603520 Feb 2 18:57 helloworld
-rw-r--r--@ 1 aarti staff 72 Feb 2 18:57 helloworld.go

@classyhacker
“The linker in the gc tool chain
creates statically-linked binaries by
default. All Go binaries therefore
include the Go run-time, along with
the run-time type information
necessary to support dynamic type
checks, reﬂection, and even panic-
time stack traces.”

@classyhacker
Compiler
Before 1.5 faster, written in C

With Go 1.5 compiler was rewritten from C to Go

`go build -i` Dependency caching

Support for Assembly, Math libraries are in assembly

GOOS
const goosList = "aix android darwin dragonﬂy freebsd hurd js linux nacl netbsd
openbsd plan9 solaris windows zos “
GOARCH
const goarchList = "386 amd64 amd64p32 arm armbe arm64 arm64be ppc64 ppc64le
mips mipsle mips64 mips64le mips64p32 mips64p32le ppc riscv riscv64 s390 s390x
sparc sparc64 wasm "

@classyhacker
Runtime
• Runtime performance is foremost on the

@classyhacker
Goroutines
• Goroutines - light weight threads

•

@classyhacker
Go 2
• Go 2 design proposals

• Go 2 will most like be backward compatible

•

@classyhacker
Memory safety
• Garbage collected

• Go Run time

•

@classyhacker
JVM vs Go runtime

@classyhacker
DevOps
• Docket

• Kubernetes

• CI/CD

• Tooling/CLI

• Terraform, Hashicorp stuﬀ etc in Go

@classyhacker
Go hits the sweet spot

@classyhacker
Scale
• GOMAXPROCS - multiCore

• GOOS - Multiplatformn

• Single Binary

• Static linking - add command for GC toolchain

•

@classyhacker
Standard Library

@classyhacker
Design Philosophy
• Simplicity is complicated

@classyhacker
Companies using Go

@classyhacker
Ruby/Ruby on rails
• Did not stick

• Could not scale

• Patches - event machine etc etc

• JRuby ( JVM again)

@classyhacker
Scala
• Hard

• Twitter moved from rails to Scala

• I hear they are building Go framework teams

•

@classyhacker
Microservices with Go
• API deve

• Tooling etc

•

@classyhacker
Clojure
• Too hard

•

@classyhacker
Rust
• Learning Curve

• More suited for embedded, take the eﬀort to learn

• When needed

•

@classyhacker
Scaling in enterprises
• Frameworks in Go

• Supporting Go in production

•

@classyhacker
High performance apps
• CGO

• Tweak memory if need be with unsafe

• Use assembly

• Usage of assembly in core libraries

@classyhacker
Multi platform build
GOOS=windows GOARCH=i386 go build
Goreleaser

@classyhacker
Decoupling
• Interfaces

• Composition over inheritance

• Encapsulation ( package, Internal etc. )

•

@classyhacker
API
• Swagger support

• GRPC/HTTP2 1st class support

•

@classyhacker
Dependency management
• Vendor directory

@classyhacker
Writing Go frameworks

@classyhacker
From X ToGo
• https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/FromXToGo

@classyhacker
Crypto/blockchain

Watch the video with slide
synchronization on InfoQ.com!
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/
go-lang-design

Go - A Key Language in Enterprise Application Development?

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