Why Learn Go

Exploring Go, the language, the ecosystem, the community.

Transcript

1. Why you should learn Go in 2017
2. About Me Aarti Parikh Sr. Software Engineer, 10+ years, mostly backend engineering Have shipped production code with Java, Ruby, JavaScript and Go. Strong Interest in Computer languages Have been writing in Go for a year. @classyhacker on twitter 2
3. GO is the 2016 Programming language of the YEAR TIOBE Language Index http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ The TIOBE programming language of the year award goes to the language with the biggest annual popularity 3
4. Language Features 25 keywords Statically typed Garbage collected Natively compiled Open source Deploy with a single binary
5. Getting Started Download Go https://golang.org/ $which go Setup GOPATH $echo $GOPATH Write helloworld.go in your favorite editor, See example. Execute $go run hello world.go
6. DEMO Hello World
7. //Executable commands must always use package main package main //An import path is a string that uniquely identifies a package import "fmt" //The main function in the main package is an entry point into the program func main() { fmt.Println("hello world") } Anatomy of Go hello world Namespace Dependencies Program entry point
8. Q. Why is my trivial program such a large binary? ➔ ls -l total 3144 -rwxr-xr-x 1 aarti staff 1603520 Feb 2 18:57 helloworld -rw-r--r--@ 1 aarti staff 72 Feb 2 18:57 helloworld.go
9. From Go FAQ’s “The linker in the gc tool chain creates statically-linked binaries by default. All Go binaries therefore include the Go run- time, along with the run-time type information necessary to support dynamic type checks, reflection, and even panic-time stack traces.” Q. Why is my trivial program such a large binary?
10. Go has no classes
11. DEMO Structs and Methods
12. Testing is built-in •Unit tests •$go test •Benchmark tests for performance •$go test -bench •Concurrency test via the race detector •$go test -race •Many more options: Coverage, Memory profiling •$go test —help
13. DEMO Leap year test ➔ go test -v === RUN TestLeapYears --- PASS: TestLeapYears (0.00s) PASS ok _/Users/aarti/dev/presentation/testing 0.005s ➔ go test -bench . Benchmark400-8 3000000 579 ns/op PASS ok _/Users/aarti/dev/presentation/testing 2.317s
14. Performance Scalability Concurrency Comprehensive list of Go users Infrastructure: Docker, InfluxDb, Kubernetes, Hashicorp Fits in easily in a microservices architecture Server side and System engineering focus Networking companies are starting to adopt it What GO is good at and who is using it?
15. Built-in Data Structures Array: Fixed length and Type safe a :=[3]int {1,2,3} b :=[2]int {1,2} a == b is False. Mismatched types [2]int and [3]int Map: No Generics support so get’s awkward at times a := map[string]int{“a”:1, “b”:2} Slices: Used everywhere for flexibility, SUPER IMPORTANT. Must Read Blog Post on Go Slices and Internal d := []byte{'h', 'e', 'l', ‘l'} d = append(d,'o') fmt.Printf(“%s",d) => hello
16. Q. What HTTP server should I use in Go? A. Use net/http directly from the standard library. It is one of the most important packages and allows you to build HTTP servers in Go.
17. The Go standard library is designed with scaling in mind. So use the packages in the standard library first. Using frameworks to do even trivial tasks is common in other languages, not so much in Go.
18. Instead of explicitly using locks to mediate access to shared data, Go encourages the use of channels to pass references to data between goroutines. - Share Memory By Communicating Blog Post Concurrency
19. DEMO Concurrency Design a Rate Printer 1. The printer reads from a file 2. The printer writes to a file 3. Print the bytes/second at which the printer is printing every second 4. Source Code
20. WHAT PEOPLE MISS Classes: Go has no classes, There are structs and interfaces. Generics: No Generics support. The built-in package has some helpers. Exceptions: Go does not have Exceptions so the error handling can be verbose. Dependency management: Does not provide a specific way to include a precise version of a library.
21. Learning Resources Official Go tour.golang.org Go specification Effective Go Ultimate Go: Comprehensive online course resource exercism.io: Practice programming and get feedback Gopher Academy Blog Dave Cheney Blog gobyexample.com Ben Johnson Blog
22. Active Supportive Community Gophercon Gobridge initiatives: Coding workshops for women WomenWhoGo Slack channel go nuts mailing list Golang Weekly newsletter
23. Ecosystem Awesome Go: https://github.com/avelino/awesome-go Trending Github Repos: https://github.com/trending/go https://golanglibs.com I personally use the following libs regularly Errors: https://github.com/pkg/errors Logs: https://github.com/sirupsen/logrus RESTful API’s: https://github.com/gorilla/mux
24. Comparing Go https://learnxinyminutes.com/ Go vs Swift: https://github.com/jakerockland/go-vs- swift/blob/master/go-vs-swift.pdf FromXtoGo: Companies that have switched: https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/FromXToGo
25. Thank You Slides and Source code at https://github.com/aarti/talks/tree/master/WhyLearnGo