> I recently got a DevOps job that mostly involves writing a new backend system in Go completely from scratch.
If this wasn't on the front page of HN I'd have stopped reading here, but it is, so I didn't, then I regretted it.
If this wasn't on the front page of HN I'd have stopped reading here, but it is, so I didn't, then I regretted it.
FWIW, I, who is usually writing JVM apps in Java/Kotlin occasionally Scala, had an app to write that that extensively used K8s APIs, and I found that the best client API was (naturally, considering the makeup of the K8s ecosystem) the Go one, so I wrote the app in Go.
I had to overcome some common Go issues (use a map[t]interface{} when you need "is x in a list of unique elements", if you need more advanced set operations on custom types, you're going to need to generate code or hard code each implementation, because generics are for suckers, allegedly. Hit some issues around channels and blocking reads and buffering, but worked around them easily enough using pointers and locks where channels weren't appropriate)
But aside from the limitations of Golang, over all it was a rather straight-forward experience. Stuff worked, tools worked, Intellij IDEA integration worked, Go's module system worked (DIAF $GOPATH), code ran, no worries.
Will say though, Go logging realllllly needs some work from the community. An SLF4J equivalent at least. I used logrus as my logging library as it gave me the easiest route to making my logs go to Kafka in Logstash format, but it has some insane defaults - like the log event timestamp defaulting to "seconds since start-up".
Oh, and be very careful with named returns. Naming a return, but then assigning nothing to it, will compile. Which is, to say the least, rather contrary to how most of Go works.
This, I believe, comes down to Go having sane default values i.e. if you name a return of type string and assign nothing to it, you'd get "", which is a valid string value and something you can check against.
But I agree it should at least be a lint warning.