The Elasticsearch Rant

Once again Xe nails it.

> Go's type system is insufficiently typeful to handle the unrestrained madness that is ElasticSearch JSON.

At first the article talks about feeding the API the raw JSON string, and I thought to myself, "wait! there's a typeful API, too". I'm impressed that the article doesn't ignore it, but zeroes straight to the main point of friction it has.

Maybe the API should be re-written to use generics now that they are available. That leaves the typing up to the programmer's specific domain and allows ES to to focus on the mechanism of the describing the search itself.

I've installed and used Apache Solr for projects alot ... With 6-digits of indexed documents. So i have experience with search indexes.

I've not had the pleasure yet of using Elastic Search. Having read the article I wonder if using a Go based library/tool was the real pain point? Are there no Java based libraries/tools that are less of a square hole round peg situation as encountered in the article?

I am using/planning to use/move to Elastic Search (from Solr). It took me < than one day to add indexing (marshalling Go structs to json) using the official package for it. I have NOT added any code for search yet and have not tried running it it anywhere except my local machine, but others in the company are already using Elastic Search so I am not too worried.