Go at SoundCloud

[anon01]

We've just started using Go as well. It smokes our Python app in terms of speed, and is fun to use (maybe just because it's new?).

I have always wondered, however, that if moving to a new language seems great because of the language, or because you have such a better understanding of the implementation of the problem you are trying to solve.

[agentultra]

You bring up an interesting point about "new."

New is fun. Exploration is fun. I think a lot of people will swear by a new language simply because it's not old and probably doesn't suffer many of the same deficiencies they're used to in their "every day," language.

This to me is an illusion however. One must remain skeptical and treat new, untested languages with even more scrutiny than an old one. Many of these new languages will make extraordinary claims. Discovering the evidence to support these claims is often left as an exercise to the programmer.

That being said, new has a lot of advantages. It's free to try to break away from past paradigms that perhaps limited programmers. Stability can always come later once the core ideas have been fleshed out. And it's always fun to work on fresh ideas rather than refining the same old ones that we're plagued with.

Personally I wouldn't use a language and compiler that only just reached 1.0 this year in a production system. If I was really interested in Go I'd certainly hack with it and perhaps on it, but I wouldn't trust it to be reliable. Maybe that makes me an old, stodgy fart but I trust wisdom over brilliance when it comes to building systems that are dependable and robust.

[pjmlp]

> It smokes our Python app in terms of speed

Like any other compiled language would do.

[laktek]

Shameless plug for my Go articles for anyone who wants to get a start - http://laktek.com/tag/go

(Yes, I will commit to finish the rest of the series)

[ungerik]

Go also works very well at STARTeurope, powering our event-platform http://startuplive.in/ Developing a high level webframework from scratch just for one website was a bit of a crazy undertaking: https://github.com/ungerik/go-start (sorry, the documentation needs a big update and a tutorial. Most time was spent on running stuff and shipping features...).

[ungerik]

Just don't use Go on 32bit systems, the 32bit garbage collector leaks. On 64bit systems everything is rock solid.

[goostavos]

I'm still a bit of a novice, could someone elaborate on what he means by operator overloading being "problem creating?" I thought that was one of the main, 'core' concepts of OOP. Inheritance, and polymorphism.

How would you make something like a GUI without being able to specialize classes by overriding certain methods?

Have I misunderstood his point?

[mseebach]

The argument is roughly that it is, in fact, not very useful, while opening up a vast array of misuses - especially in the domain of being all too clever. What does "+" mean on a list and an object? Add, probably. But what if it's two lists? Union? Or add the second list as the last element to the first? Named functions "add" and "union" aren't any less readable and loads more descriptive.

The only situation you positively need operator overloading is when doing arithmetic, and you should do that using the built in types. This, of course, sucks when the built in types are inadequate, and you e.g. want to use a arbitrary precision library such as BigDecimal in Java.

This, of course, is an opinion, and I'm not shy to admit it's been shaped by being burned by Lift, the Scala web framework which makes heavy use of symbolic function names which makes it incredibly difficult to talk about or search for answers online.

[Lewisham]

His point is that, if you aren't familiar with the code, operator overloading can be difficult to read. It gives objects the appearance of being native types, and it is sometimes not entirely clear what the result of the overload might be. What does "dog + cat" equal? In an extreme example, if you are crazy enough, it might make sense to have animal + animal = baby animal. You need to temper that example down to something closer to reality :)

I personally like overloading, but I think it's probably too easy to abuse, and I can see how it would cause problems with a team size larger than 5.

As far as I can see, whenever the Go team encountered a language feature that could possibly be abused, they always deferred to leaving it out. Whether that is good or bad I'm not sure we will know until we have years of experience with it.

[mseepgood]

Operator overloading has nothing to do with OOP.

In go you get polymorphism via interfaces and you can share implementation via embedding. http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#embedding

[skybrian]

I haven't seen a GUI written in Go yet, but the basic idea is that you don't customize via inheritance; you do it in a different way. For example, in many UI libraries, you can create a function and ask a widget to call you when you receive an event; the widget will have methods like:

  addClickHandler(myFunction)

Any customization you could do with inheritance could be done with a callback function instead, provided that the object has the hook you want.

In Go, there is also an "interface" which is basically a set of methods.

[paraboul]

Opertor overloading is really horrible.

By reading the code "foo + bar" you can't know what is really doing internally.

He is talking about operator (+-*=[]&) overloading. Not method overloading.

[robharper]

Yes, I think you misunderstood. You are thinking of overriding methods, which is very important. Operator overloading is where you redefine the behavior of a "+" symbol, for example.

[fjellfras]

What sort of development environment are others here using for go (if using it at all, of course) ? I've had reasonably good experience with the go-mode in emacs.

[shawnps]

I'm using vim with the vim plugins that come in go/misc/vim. I use :Import and :Drop for adding and removing imports, and :Fmt to run gofmt in vim. I also have a git pre-commit hook that runs gofmt.

[ssteel]

I'm one of the project owners on the GoClipse project. I do a lot of polyglot development (Java, Javascript, C, Go, & a little Python). I've used and liked vim, Sublime w/ GoSublime, and GoClipse. All with gocode. I have a hard time escaping Eclipse, in general, because of my skill profile. It kind of unifies the experience.

http://code.google.com/p/goclipse/ https://github.com/nsf/gocode

[redbad]

Sublime Text 2 + GoSublime has been a really great experience for me.

http://www.sublimetext.com/2

https://github.com/DisposaBoy/GoSublime

[jff]

I use Acme, simply because it's got good buffer management and a useful editing language. I also used go-mode about a year ago, before I got sick of emacs.

[andrewbinstock]

LiteIDE X (http://code.google.com/p/liteide) is a small, portable IDE for Go with package management, build management, and compilation from within the IDE. Also, light debugging support. And, OSS, of course. I've used it on smallish Go projects without problems.

[truebosko]

The way they describe Go as a WYSIWYG language makes me think of functional programming languages (e.g. mostly of elimination of side effects.)

[geoka9]

It makes me think of getting rid of OOP and saying goodbye to the overengineering overhead it involves.

It took us 25 years to begin to see that the king is naked!

UPDATE: I have a feeling that in 25 years we'll be dissing the current fad du jour - functional programming.

[zaiste]

Nowadays, polyglot approach is the only right path for a software company. When I arrived in Berlin a month ago, I was positively surprised that SoundCloud supports local Clojure or functional programming groups. Keep up with great work!

[_ak]

And, of course, they regularly host the Berlin Go User Group.

[shortlived]

  especially, as most new engineers on Go projects lament, during error handling

Does any have pointers to reading material or care to explain the lack of error handling in Go?

[swdunlop]

Right. Early in learning golang, many people will get tired of typing:

    ..., err := doStuff()
    if err != nil {
        return err
    }

The usual text editor features, like templates, reduce the typing, but the point is that the programmer must think, each time, about what they want to do when a function fails. This can become either a really good habit, or a distraction, depending on your perspective and problem domain.

When people say Go poor or no error handling, this is probably what they are complaining about. The fundamental properties offered by try/catch/throw are unpacked by Go into defer, recover and multiple value returns and type switches. Go's designers make the argument that when used thoughtlessly, exceptions encourages error handling antipatterns.

[dhconnelly]

Go doesn't "lack error-handling." They're referring to the fact that Go doesn't have exceptions; you check return codes to detect and handle errors. For some this is tedious, but has advantages (mentioned in the article) with respect to understanding an entire program.

[zemo]

it's not there there's no error handling; it's that there's no exceptions. Instead, you use multiple return values, one of which is an error, and you check the return value for an error. It forces you to handle errors at the call site and makes diapers unimplementable.

[jurre]

is this from looking at their jobs page? because usually those 'requirements' are just guidelines to make sure the people applying know their stuff, and if you contact the company it turns out they're a little more flexible.

[user911302966]

I'm confused. I see the word "engineer" appear several times, but the company appears to offer MP3 recording technology and a "share" button.

Where are the moving parts?

[wetbrain]

I've heard the same about Twitter. All they do is publish short messages, why do they have 1000 employees?

There's always many problems that aren't immediately apparent but difficult.

[mseepgood]

ʕ ◔ϖ◔ʔ <- Gopher

[brandoncapecci]

Why can't people just be satisfied with Ruby or Python...

[emmett]

Because this is how progress happens. You could have equally asked about Ruby, why can't people be satisfied with Perl and PHP?

Why would this bother you that they are trying new things and learning?

[cloudhead]

would that make your day?