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Comment by joseluisq | Hacker News Reader

I transcribe the following: "Go is a poor choice of language for a container runtime," Abrams wrote in a blog post." Go is a great language, but for small system utilities that need tight control over threads and make a high volume of syscalls, there are better options."

Is this true ?

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Abrams is the author of the Go Netlink library, and participates in an interesting conversation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14470231 (as `vishvananda`, it's the top comment).

Many of the things the commenters discuss there are intricate. It's a lot of people who've worked on container runtimes and the issues relate to the interaction of Go with POSIX process and thread semantics. Go is not really intended to have transparent, finely controlled integration with C systems stuff...while Rust is.

I recently came up against this when deciding on a language to implement a POSIX-api backed utility.

Go does not have the fork(2) POSIX API. This makes it much more difficult to spawn a process with precise POSIX semantics.

Another issue is that when a goroutine (a fiber running in an OS thread) makes a syscall that blocks, that goroutine might be un-scheduled and then later resumed on a different OS thread. If your syscall is one that operates on the call-in OS thread, this could cause poor results. I think there are some mitigation strategies, but these two issues make syscall programming frustrating in Go.

Not sure about that, but Oracle is a poor choice as a source of open source tools, given their history.

Right, especially its famous MySQL "Community"...

The author was one of the heaviest early contributors on the Openstack project.

Sadly whatever open source work a person does while working for Oracle seems to be tainted by it:

It might be successful but if the name Oracle shows up I am scared.

How is this relevant to the question raised by the person you're replying to? You've raised an entirely different concern and ignored the question. Why did you post this as a reply rather than a top level comment?

Author here. This hit hacker news in the middle of the night my time. I think the other replies already answered your question but it is worth mentioning that my point could have been worded better. Note that go works very well for other parts of the container system: docker client, docker daemon, containerd, kubernetes, etc. It is just the low-level namespace handling it has trouble with.

Absolutely. There was a recent thread about how Linux namespaces and Go really don't like each other. There are many more issues with Go. Maybe I should write a blog post about it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14479284

I would be great if you could write a post about that!

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