Jon Bodner shared a deep dive into why the world depends on simple, reliable, well-understood technologies like Go.

The one exciting thing that Go has is built-in concurrency support via goroutines, channels, and select. However, it is based on ideas from CSP, communicating sequential processes, which was first described in 1978.

This doesn’t sound like a programming language from the 21st century, does it?

And yet, Go is the 3rd most wanted and (maybe not coincidentally) the 3rd highest paying language, according to Stack Overflow. Every startup in Silicon Valley is using Go to build their infrastructure. Docker, Kubernetes, etcd, Terraform, Vault, Consul, Traefik and lots of other cutting-edge projects are written in Go. So what’s going on? Why is everyone interested in this boring language?

As a fun aside, I searched the Go Time transcripts for the word “boring” and found this gem from Kelsey Hightower on Go Time #114…

When infrastructure gets boring, something else will become exciting above it.

…which makes sense why Go being boring is fantastic, because there’s so many exciting things being built with it.

Building a new app in Go can involve a lot of technical decisions. How will your code be structured? How will you handle background jobs? What will your deploy process look like? In this episode we will walk through the decisions made while building the public release of Pace.dev.

Leaning from mistakes is key to progressing. In this episode Ben, Aaron, Kris, and Jon discuss some of our mistakes - like spending too much time designing a feature that isn’t that important, or using channels excessively when first learning Go - and how we learned from them.

Application deployment and management should be automated, auditable, and easy to understand and that’s what beetle tries to achieve in a simple manner. Beetle automates the deployment and rollback of your applications in a multi-cluster, multi-namespaces kubernetes environments. Easy to integrate with through API endpoints & webhooks to fit a variety of workflows.

This new data-science-focused language is fully compatible with Go*, but streamlines things for data science use. It simplifies common scripting tasks. This in Go:

package main

func main() {
    a := []float64{1, 2, 3.4}
    println(a)
}

Becomes this in Go+:

a := [1, 2, 3.4]
println(a)

And adds features like list comprehensions for easier data processing:

a := [1, 3, 5, 7, 11]
b := [x*x for x <- a, x > 3]
println(b) // output: [25 49 121]

mapData := {"Hi": 1, "Hello": 2, "Go+": 3}
reversedMap := {v: k for k, v <- mapData}
println(reversedMap) // output: map[1:Hi 2:Hello 3:Go+]

It can be compiled directly to bytecode or transpiled into Go code. Give it a go on the playground.

*I almost described it as a “superset” of Go, but I’m not 💯 if that’s true.

Mat Ryer talks to a new full-time Go programmer, an intern at Google, and a high-school programmer about the tech world from their perspective.

This program was a joy to put together. Its purpose was fun and education, and in no way to create a modern or even realistic Lisp implementation. The goal was to turn that marvelous page 13 into a working interpreter using clean, direct Go code.

If you’re interested in what one of Go’s creators believes is “clean, direct Go code”, then you’re interested in this repo.

Ian Lance Taylor:

It’s been almost a year since we last wrote about the possibility of adding generics to Go. It’s time for an update.

Jump straight to the updated design draft or read Ian’s post for details on the new experimental translation tool and the the kinds of feedback they are seeking. If you’re only interested in a release date for the final implementation:

if everybody is completely happy with the design draft and it does not require any further adjustments, the earliest that generics could be added to Go would be the Go 1.17 release, scheduled for August 2021.

Note: that’s the earliest it will be. This is not a guarantee by any means.

Mat, Jon, and Jaana discuss reflection and meta programming. How do other languages use reflection, and how does that differ from Go’s approach? What libraries are using reflection well? What are some examples of bad times to use reflect? What alternative approaches exist? And what are those weird struct tags I keep seeing in Go code?

With immudb you can track changes in sensitive data in your transactional databases and then record those changes permanently in a tamperproof immudb database. This allows you to keep an indelible history of sensitive data, for example debit/credit card transactions.

There are so many options for storing data these days. If you haven’t heard Go Time’s excellent episode on databases yet, Jaana does a great job of explaining some of the trade-offs.

It’s backwards compatible back to IE 8 (😱), loads super fast thanks to minimal page weight, and completely free to run on Netlify. Get yer live action demo right here.

You have wrapped your head around the Go syntax and practised them one by one, however you won’t feel comfortable writing applications in Go unless you build one.

In this blog post we’ll build a CLI application in Go, which we’ll call go-grab-xkcd. This application fetches comics from XKCD and provides you with various options through command-line arguments.

Databases are tricky, especially at scale. In this episode Mat, Jaana, and Jon discuss different types of databases, the pros and cons of each, along with the many ways developers can have issues with databases. They also explore questions like, “Why are serial IDs problematic?” and “What alternatives are there if we aren’t using serial IDs?” while at it.

Go Binaries is an on-demand binary server, allowing non-Go users to quickly install tools written in Go without installing go itself, and removing the burden of cross-compiling and uploading dozens of binaries for every command-line you write.

Johnny and Jon are joined by Denise to talk about her role at GitHub and what the community and safety team does to help open source project creators and contributors, GoCon Canada and the role of organizing a conference, and more.

This repository contains the examples, exercises, and quizzes for my Go course: Learn Go Programming: Complete Bootcamp Course. However, even without the course, using this repository, you can learn a great deal of information about Go. Inside, there are thousands of examples, exercises and quizzes.

You’re welcome to contribute your own exercises, quizzes and wiki.

Distributed systems are hard. Building a distributed messaging system for these systems to communicate is even harder. In this episode, we unpack some of the challenges of building distributed messaging systems (like NATS), including how Go makes that easy and/or hard as applicable.

Is this more proof of Cunningham’s law, which says, “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”

Update: as some keen HN commenters have pointed out, it looks like the rust program is not actually equivalent to the go program. The go program parses the string once, while the rust program parses it repeatedly inside every loop. It’s quite late in Sydney as I write this so I’m not up for a fix right now, but this post is probably Fake News.

Read Christian’s post then have fun in the comments and discussions on HN and Reddit analyzing his hypothesis, which includes a repo of code to backup his ideas.

Put on your dark hoodie, turn all the lights off, and join the author of Black Hat Go as we explore the darker side of Go.

Caddy has been around for a while, so this is a major release for the project. Hard to believe this is true today (emphasis added)

Still the only web server to use TLS automatically and by default.

Caddy 2’s new architecture was inspired by 5 years of experience with Caddy 1 and took 14 months to design. There’s a lot here, so we probably need to get the team on The Changelog or Go Time to discuss in depth.

Mat, Johnny and Jon are joined by Elias, creator of Gio, to discuss GUIs. Specifically, we explore the pros and cons of immediate vs retained mode and explore some examples of each, as well how some frameworks like React are attempting to bring the benefits of immediate mode to a retained mode world (the DOM).

If you missed Go Remote Fest over the weekend then you missed this talk (slides only for now) from Daniel Martí on what’s coming in the next release of Go (Go 1.15) scheduled for August of this year.

What are you most excited about for this upcoming release of Go?

Good news! For 2019 there were 10,975 responses to the survey — that’s almost twice as many as last year. Here are few major findings from the results, but of course, you should dig in because they make it really easy to scan and grok the details.

• The demographics of our respondents are similar to Stack Overflow’s survey respondents, which increases our confidence that these results are representative of the larger Go developer audience.
• A majority of respondents use Go every day, and this number has been trending up each year.
• Respondents are using Go to solve similar problems, particularly building API/RPC services and CLIs, regardless of the size of organization they work at.
• Most teams try to update to the latest Go release quickly; when third-party providers are late to support the current Go release, this creates an adoption blocker for developers.
• Almost everyone in the Go ecosystem is now using modules, but some confusion around package management remains.
• VS Code and GoLand have continued to see increased use; they’re now preferred by 3 out of 4 respondents.

The gang discusses WebRTC with Sean DuBois, creator of the Pion project and author of a pure Go WebRTC implementation. What exactly is WebRTC? Why is it so popular for video chatting? How does it work under the hood, and how does it compare with other real-time communication options?

Ilija Eftimov:

For folks that do not have experience with lower level languages, understanding bytes and how to work with them can be challenging.

That’s why I wrote this article, taking a simple idea such as a Slack chat, turning the interactions (join/leave channel, send message to channel or user, etc) into a TCP protocol. Then I show the reader how they can implement the protocol in Go, by building a concurrent TCP server and learn more about bytes and working with bytes in the process.

I love it when people take things we do understand (like basic Slack interactions) and use them to teach us something we don’t understand (how to build a TCP protocol).