YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Go Concurrency Distilled

21 points chmaynard 10 hours ago 4 comments

SamInTheShell 35 minutes ago | parent

The concurrency and threading in Go just feels like magic compared to every other language. I'm a goroutine addict and I refuse to be rehabilitated.

Just from observations over the years, I don't think there's any other language quite like this, in terms of how things can end up happening in any thread.

chimbambum 31 minutes ago | parent

any downsides to it in your experience?

unscaled 12 minutes ago | parent

Managing channels and making sure they are closed just once is quite messy compared to other languages. The Go channel axioms[1] don't make much sense: why does closing a channel multiple times panic, but reading from a closed channel returns a zero value?

Kotlin gets this right. On send/receive, you can use trySend or tryReceive if you want to avoid exceptions. Considering Kotlin also has coroutines and structured concurrency, concurrency in Kotlin feels more ergonomic to me than Go. At least if you want to get concurrent code with least amount of bugs and not just least amount of extra keywords.

[1] https://dave.cheney.net/2014/03/19/channel-axioms

Joel_Mckay 10 minutes ago | parent

Go and Julia are fun languages.

In production, Go has proven solid for several years. It is best when used with the native code people ported.

There are only two issues I encountered:

1. getting the legacy ancient C source meta-circular Go compiler working to port the Go boot-strap compiler upgrade chain is a kick in the pants. However, once it is on a architecture it has proven rather resilient.

2. memory limited systems can develop reliability issues, as Go programs will often ungracefully throw hard to diagnose unrelated errors during each crash. A good metric is 3:1 of your average load as a safety margin (if you see 2GiB in average RAM use, make sure to over-provision the host with 8GiB RAM etc.)

Other than the above short list of edge cases, if you join a pure Go project it is usually pretty reliable. Most community folks interested in the language seem fairly competent at building stuff that is fun. =3