

Ask HN: What are you using Go for? - vram22

I&#x27;m interested in knowing what HNers are doing with Go (other than learning about it, though it would be interesting to hear about learning projects too). Thanks.
======
dkuntz2
A collaborative music jukebox that lets multiple people listen to the stream
over a network. Because cloud-based jukeboxes seem to be all the rage, but
none of them let you play music with other people at the same time. We gave it
a fun name too: [https://github.com/turbowookie/turbo-
wookie](https://github.com/turbowookie/turbo-wookie). Go is used for the HTTP
server, and is basically a layer over interacting with MPD.

Also working on a flat-file blogging system with an online editor, because
flat-file is the middle ground between a static-site generator and a
traditional database-based blogging engine.

~~~
vram22
Innovative use of Go, I must say.

~~~
dkuntz2
It was a school project. We were the only team to use new technologies.
Everyone else used Java or C# (with one group using PHP). Go seemed cool. Dart
(which we used for the frontend) also seemed cool.

------
lazyjones
After dabbling with it for a couple of weeks, I wrote the backend (search &
indexing implementation using the Go standard library's suffix array
implementation) of our websites' autocomplete feature. It's been running for 7
months without a crash and without leaking memory, serving several million
requests/day.

I'd like to use it more, but we have so many layers of legacy Perl code, that
it's difficult to replace single components because of their dependencies
(rewriting anything worthwhile would mean rewriting 4-5 libraries also).

~~~
workhere-io
_It 's been running for 7 months without a crash and without leaking memory,
serving several million requests/day._

Sounds cool. What kind of server are you running this on?

~~~
lazyjones
> _What kind of server are you running this on?_

It runs on a single node of a 4-in-1 supermicro server with dual Opteron 6136
CPUs. Because it uses so little CPU time (about 15% of one core on average),
we are now using the server for other things as well ...

------
bliti
As the public entry point towards many internal APIs. Its lighter and faster
than any scripting language. Gorilla toolbox made it very easy to write.

~~~
vram22
Interesting use case.

~~~
bliti
It was to simplify a rather complicated system that used bots. Each bot would
report home by requesting different URLs. That seemed overly complicated to
me, because one URI change would break every single bot. I then created the
public interface and simplified it to one URI. Then the data structure being
sent to the APIs got an additional parameter. It told the public interface
which API had to get that data. This was a very simple change, because the
data structure was defined by the APIs and common among all. It ended up being
very fast and allowed the bots to spend less time waiting for a response. Was
planning to add a messaging queue but then I left the project (I was a
consultant).

~~~
vram22
>Then the data structure being sent to the APIs got an additional parameter.
It told the public interface which API had to get that data.

Nice technique.

~~~
bliti
I call it the "Boarding Pass Pattern." I modeled it after the typical airplane
boarding pass where everyone has the same data structure yet is going to
different places/doing different things. :)

~~~
vram22
Good name :) Another possible name could be the Differentiator Pattern (heh,
just a wild try), since it differentiates between calls which otherwise have
the same data. Or even the Call Router pattern, for obvious reasons ...

------
sergiotapia
I'm using it to scrape a popular gaming API endpoint to get info on hundreds
of matches per day. I chose Go because it's fast, easily deployable and I
enjoy it. :)

~~~
nnash
Dotabuff? Awesome work if its you.

------
joewalnes
This:
[https://github.com/joewalnes/websocketd](https://github.com/joewalnes/websocketd)

~~~
vram22
Just checked the github page for it. Looks interesting and useful. Could be
used to push system monitoring data to a browser (among tons of other uses, of
course). Trying it out ...

~~~
joewalnes
Here's an example of using it to build a quick Linux system monitoring
dashboard: [https://github.com/joewalnes/web-
vmstats](https://github.com/joewalnes/web-vmstats)

~~~
vram22
Wrote something similar but without much GUI, here:

[http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/01/websocketd-and-python-
for-...](http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/01/websocketd-and-python-for-
system.html)

websocketd is a good tool.

------
blooberr
I work with streaming data and Go has been great reducing the number of
backend workers (formerly in Ruby) to handle about 1 TB/day in real time. It's
very stable and great for building an internal data aggregator.

A friend has also been using Go to create a board game as his side project.

~~~
vram22
Interesting about the data volume.

What's used for the GUI of the game?

~~~
blooberr
HTML 5 canvas.

------
charlesdm
Not using Go in production, but I've been looking at using it for a mobile API
for a stateful system (with both a REST and Websocket interface). Seems to be
great for realtime system with a lot of different data inputs.

~~~
vram22
Interesting.

------
wilsonfiifi
Bytengine :
[https://github.com/johnwilson/bytengine](https://github.com/johnwilson/bytengine)
Work in progress but man is Go fun!

~~~
vram22
Had a quick look at Bytengine. Like the idea of using Linux-like file paths to
refer to documents.

>Files are JSON documents to which you can attach any binary/text data (docx,
txt, pdf, jpeg, etc...).

I'm guessing you store the filename(s) of the attached data (docx, txt, pdf,
...) in the JSON fragment?

------
Wezc
Docker is writing in Go ([http://www.docker.io/](http://www.docker.io/))

~~~
vram22
Yes, had seen that some days ago, but thanks.

I had blogged about Docker using LXC, as part of this post about Domino, a
Python PaaS for data science:

[http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/12/domino-paas-for-data-
scien...](http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/12/domino-paas-for-data-science.html)

and had seen then that Docker uses Go, though I didn't say so in the post.

Cool.

------
zachlatta
I've been using it primarily for a little bit of systems programming and
writing internal utilities at work.

~~~
vram22
Utilities seems like a good use of Go, apart from the others I'm aware of. I
mean command-line ones.

~~~
dded
> Utilities seems like a good use of Go

Can you elaborate? I'm unfamiliar with Go, but most of my Python (and Perl,
sigh) coding could be classified as "utilities for work". I would have thought
that any language with an explicit compile step would be at a disadvantage in
this space.

~~~
vram22
>Can you elaborate?

Sure.

>I would have thought that any language with an explicit compile step would be
at a disadvantage in this space.

Not exactly, and not always. In fact it can be the opposite. It depends on a
few factors, and there are tradeoffs.

Consider that so many of the command-line utilities that come bundled with
Unixen (Unix, Linux, BSD) are written in C - just look in /bin, /usr/bin, etc
(some of the default dirs in $PATH). (Do a "file * | less" in those dirs.)

(Though there definitely are utilities that are written purely in *sh, or
Perl, or Python, and more so these days than some years ago. Still, some,
particularly shell scripts, tend to make calls to compiled utilities such as
sed, awk, grep, ls, du, df, ps, and many other commands.)

For utilities used often or heavily, or where performance is important, a
compiled binary can often be a good choice: lower startup time (don't have to
start the interpreter to run the script, often faster run time (because
running compiled machine code vs. interpreted or JIT'ed).

Go has performance closer to C than Python does, and also has some aspects of
HLL's (High Level Languages) like Python. The compile only has to be done once
per machine or platform, remember; also, Go compilation is quite fast, which
was a design goal of the language. And if you compile once on one machine, you
can just copy the binary (in an automated way, too) to any number of other
machines running the same OS and version. With a self-sufficient binary, you
avoid both the issues of missing or incorrect dynamically loaded libraries of
languages like C (if the C program uses them), and the issues of missing or
wrong versions of required libraries, with languages like Python.

Those are some reasons I could think of, off the top of my head. There may be
others, both pro and con.

~~~
vram22
More reasons: some of the Go language creators were heavily involved in the
creation of Unix and C, and while I don't know it for a fact, it's pretty
likely that they intended and designed Go to be useful for command-line tools
as well, e.g. servers, utilities, etc. Also, Go has the flags package for
handling command-line arguments (though other languages like Python do have
various libs for that too).

~~~
vram22
Also, though not directly related to your question, Torbit (later acquired by
Walmart Labs), used Go, due to its combination of productivity and
performance. Josh Fraser, Torbit co-founder, told me that.

[http://www.torbit.com/](http://www.torbit.com/)

[http://www.onlineaspect.com/about/](http://www.onlineaspect.com/about/)
(Josh's site)

