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   Application Modernization

   Why I love Go
   September 12, 2022
     *
     *
     *
     *

David Yach

   Director of Engineering at Google Cloud

   I’ve been building software over the last four decades, as a developer,
   manager and executive in both small and large software companies. I
   started my career working on commercial compilers, first BASIC and then
   C. I have written a lot of code in many different languages, and
   managed teams with even broader language usage.

   I learned Go about 5 years ago when I was CTO at a startup/scaleup. At
   the time, we were looking to move to a microservice architecture, and
   that shift gave us the opportunity to consider moving away from the
   incumbent language (Scala). As I read through the Go tutorials, my
   compiler-writing background came back to me and I found myself
   repeatedly thinking “That’s cool – I know why the Go team did that!â€<C3A2> So
   I got hooked on the language design.

Learning

   I have worked with many different computer languages over the years, so
   I was not surprised I could quickly get started writing Go programs
   after reading through the online documents and tutorials. But then when
   I saw a new co-op student (a.k.a. intern) learn Go and write a
   substantial prototype in their first two weeks on the job, it became
   clear that Go was much easier to learn than many other languages.

Writing code

   As I started writing my first Go programs, the first thing that struck
   me was the blazing compiler speed. It was as fast or faster starting my
   application than many interpreted languages, yet it was a compiled
   program with a strongly typed language. (I have an affinity for
   strongly typed languages – I have spent way too much time tracking down
   obscure issues in my own code in dynamic typed languages, where the
   same issue would have been a compile error in a strongly typed
   language.) Even better, in Go I often don’t need to declare the type –
   the compiler figures it out.

   I was impressed with the standard Go library – it included many of the
   capabilities required by modern applications – things like HTTP
   support, JSON handling and encryption. Many other languages required
   you to use a third-party library for these features, and often there
   were multiple competing libraries to choose from, adding another
   decision point for the developer. With Go, I could go to the standard
   library GoDoc and get started right away.

   There were a few other language decisions that I found helpful. One is
   that the compiler figures out if you are returning a pointer to a
   local, and behind the scenes allocates the memory rather than using the
   stack. This prevents bugs, and I find the code more readable.

   I also like that you don’t declare that you support an interface. I
   wasn’t sure I would like this at first because it isn’t obvious if a
   type implements a particular interface, but I found greater value in
   the fact that I wasn’t dependent on the code author (even if it was
   me!) to declare that the interface is implemented. This first hit home
   when I used fmt.Println() and it automatically used the String() method
   I had implemented even though it hadn’t occurred to me that I was
   implementing the Stringer interface.

   The last feature I’ll note is the ability to do concurrent programming
   through channels and goroutines. The model is simple to understand yet
   powerful.

Reading code

   After writing more Go code and starting to incorporate third party
   libraries, I had a realization that had never occurred to me before –
   as a developer, I spend a lot of time reading code. In fact, I probably
   spend more time reading code than writing it, once you start counting
   code reviews, debugging, and evaluating third-party libraries.

   What was different about reading Go code? I would summarize it by “it
   all looks the same.â€<C3A2> What do I mean by that? Go format ensures all the
   braces are in the same spot; capitalized identifiers are exported;
   there are no implicit conversions, even of internal types; and there is
   no overloading of operators, functions or methods. That means that with
   Go code, “what you see is what you getâ€<C3A2> with no hidden meaning. Of
   course, it doesn’t help me to understand a complicated algorithm, but
   it does mean that I can concentrate more on that algorithm because I
   don’t have to understand whether ‘+’ is overloaded, for example.

   I was also pleasantly surprised when I used GoDoc on one of my
   projects, and discovered that I had semi-reasonable documentation
   without doing anything while writing the code other than adding
   comments on my functions and methods based on nagging from the IDE I
   was using. I did spend some time cleaning up the comments after that,
   but I’m not sure I would have even started that work if Go hadn’t given
   me a great starting point.

Testing code

   Go test is part of the standard Go tools and supported by IDEs, making
   it easy to get started creating unit tests for my code. And like the
   standard Go library, having a standard way to do tests means I don’t
   have to evaluate external testing frameworks and select one. I can also
   understand the tests when I’m evaluating a third party library.

   Even better, the default behavior running package tests in VSCode is to
   enable Go’s built-in code coverage. I had never taken code coverage
   seriously working in other languages, partly because it was often
   difficult to set up. But the immediate feedback (helped by the blazing
   compile speed) gamified this for me, and I found myself adding tests to
   increase code coverage (and finding new bugs along the way).

   Go doesn’t allow circular dependencies between packages. While this has
   caused me some rethinking while writing code, I find it makes my
   testing regimen easier to think about – if I depend on a package, I can
   rely on that package to have its own tests covering its capabilities.

Deploying code

   I learned Go at the same time we were migrating towards container-based
   microservices. In that environment, the fact that Go produces a single,
   self-contained executable makes it much easier and more efficient to
   build and manage containers. I can build a container layer with one
   single file, which is often a single-digit number of MB in size,
   compared to our prior JVM-based containers which started with hundreds
   of MB for the Java runtime then another layer for our application. (It
   is easy to forget how much this overhead ends up costing in production,
   particularly if you have hundreds or thousands of containers running).

   Second, Go has built-in cross compiling capabilities so our development
   machines, containers and cloud hardware don’t all have to all be on the
   same processor or operating system. For example, I can use a Linux
   build machine to produce client executables for Linux, Mac and Windows.
   Again, this takes away a complicated decision process due to artificial
   constraints.

   Finally, Go has established a well defined set of principles for
   versioning and compatibility. While not all pieces of this are
   enforced, having the principles from an authoritative source helps
   manage the real life challenges of keeping your software supply chain
   up to date. For example, it is strongly recommended that breaking
   changes require a new major version number. While not enforced, it
   leads the community to call out any open source package that violates
   this principle.

What do I miss?

   I did miss generics; thankfully Go 1.18 added support. And I do wish
   the standard library offered immutable collections (like Scala and
   other functional languages). Embedding instead of inheritance works
   pretty much the same in many cases, but requires some deep thinking
   sometimes.

   My most frequent coding mistake is when I should have used a pointer
   receiver for a method and didn’t, then modify the receiver expecting
   the changes to be visible when the method returns. The code looks
   correct, the right values get assigned if I use a debugger to step
   through or issue prints, but the changes disappear after the method
   returns. I think I would have preferred if receivers were immutable, it
   would have caught these errors at compile time, and in the few
   remaining cases where I wanted to modify the receiver I would have
   copied it to a local variable.

In conclusion

   As you can tell, I am a huge fan of Go, from even before I joined
   Google. I am impressed by the language and ecosystem design, and by the
   implementation. For me, Go makes me a more productive developer and I’m
   more confident in the quality of the code I produce.

   Go, give it a [46]try!

   Posted in
     * [47]Application Modernization
     * [48]Application Development
     * [49]Open Source

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