Go

There are quite a few IDE choices for Go. I’m not going to list them all, but here are my prefered ones with the reasoning behind it. The free option VS code is my main IDE as of late. It does not matter if I code Go or Node, I always prefer to go with VS code. I used to use Atom for it’s extensibility and the amount of packages avaialble. But recently, I’ve felt that the quality of packages and the editor itself is better on VS code. That might be due to the fact that it has the backing of Microsoft. Personal experience shows, that open source products backed by huge companies tend to do better over time. It’s no surprised that VS code has exploded recently and the amount of extensions available now is pretty darn amazing. All you need to do is intall a Go extension and you’re ready to… well… Go. While it’s not as fast as sublime or other light weight editors I find it pretty snappy for small to medium sized projects. Microsoft’s intellisense is pretty damn good. Getting delve also allows for debugging inside it, albeit delve itself seems a bit sluggish and unresponsive. That’s probably a general rant of mine with go - the debuggers seem to be rather poor. Despite this, I really love VS code for the ability to support pretty much any language you can think of. ...

Since this post got quite a bit of traction, I decided to update it by rerunning all the benchmarks as well as adding GO’s fasthttp and Node’s express to the comparison. I came across this blog post on ayende.com. Here Oren Eini tries to see how far he could push a simple ipify style of api on an EC2 by running a synthetic benchmark. He hosts the http server on a T2.nano instance and then uses wrk to benchmark it from a T2.small instance. After reading this, I thought to myself - surely .NET cannot be quicker than GO. I decided to try and make a similar effort and get a little bit of competition going between a .NET implementation with, hopefully, a representative version of Oren’s .NET server made with GO. For GO - I went with 3 candidates gin, fasthttp and iris. I also benchmark Node’s Express. All the tests were performed on the same EC2 instance, with production/release configurations, so variance should be low. I also use the same parameters for wrk as Oren. This is as close as I could get to apples to apples type of comparison. ...

Defer is the golang’s version of the more familliar finally statement of the try/catch block in languages like Java and C#. The defer allows you to perform actions when surrounding function returns or panics. Unlike finally blocks though it does not need to be placed at the bottom of the code block. You can also have multiple defer statements in a single function body. This allows for handy clean up of resources. It does have its downsides though. It does add overhead so using it everywhere might not be the best idea. ...

I’ve been using Go as my main programming language at work for the last 6 months. Here’s why I absolutely adore the language. It’s simple Go is remarkably simple. It’s an object oriented programming language but instead of the more typical classes you find in C# or Java it only has structs. Structs cannot inherit, meaning you can’t end up in inheritance hell. I won’t go into detail why inheritance is bad, but if you want an explanation Inheritance is Inherently Evil is a good read on that. All you want to achieve with inheritance can instead be done through composition and the use of interfaces. It also gets rid of generics. This means that the code you read will be clear and simple. It might be more verbose than many other languages but you also carry more control. ...