Following my post, I decided to take on an action and learn Go.

Should I learn Go?

Ido Shamun ・ Sep 4 '18 ・ 1 min read

#discuss #go #career

As everyone told me it was an easy task and since then I have already deployed two Go services to production on Kubernetes.

Here are my thoughts, bare with me and let me know what you think:

Pros

• Very easy to learn
• Lightweight (memory & footprint)
• High performance
• Implementation is pretty straightforward
• Typed language

Cons

• Error handling can be messy
• Dep (dependency manager) is not as trivial as NPM
• GOPATH!? Why is everything has to be in the same directory?
• Imperative programming (just a personal opinion)

Tips

• Use alpine or even scratch as a base docker image (my docker image is only 10MB)
• Make sure to use circuit breakers and timeouts for every third party call (external services, database, etc...). My favorite is afex/hystrix-go, I also tried sony/gobreaker but it has some performance overhead.
• Use uber-go/automaxprocs for automatically setting GOMAXPROCS according to the resources quota of Kubernetes
• To mock functions declare them as variables
• I use the builtin net/http router, usually it is more than enough for a simple microservice

Currently I am having fun writing Go and feeling confident with the outcome. I will keep it going for a while and see how it goes 😜