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Comment by sreque | Hacker News Reader

I'm only saying that it would take more effort and place more burden on a developer to figure out how to do all that in their programming language rather than just implement a function. I'm surprised this is a contested point.

Tell me in Java, without looking up any online resource, how to set up a FastCGI web application. Can you? Probably not. Now tell me how to write a static method in Java. If you have at least the equivalent Java experience of a freshman undergrad, you can do the latter but not the former.

If you think Lambda should use FastCGI as its common interface, then by all means create a project on github that deploys a Go-based FastCGI bridge to Lambda and makes it easy for you to bundle up your FastCGI application into a Lambda function. Problem solved! Now you just have to get people to use it.

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Implementing a Go lambda is already more complicated than writing a function. It requires binding to a TCP port and receiving gob encoded values. AWS released a library that abstracts that into

    // main.go                                                                  
    package main                                                            

    import (                                                                
      "github.com/aws/aws-lambda-go/lambda"                                 
    )                                                                       

    func hello() (string, error) {                                          
      return "Hello ƛ!", nil                                                
    }                                                                       

    func main() {                                                           
      // Make the handler available for Remote Procedure Call by AWS Lambda 
      lambda.Start(hello)                                                   
    }

lambda.Start is the abstraction wrapper.

Why is there a crossbar in the ƛ? Shouldn't it rather be λ?

I think they have to divide by 2 pi to properly normalize it for a distributed filesystem, analogous to quantum's h-bar.

[Edit: this is a joke. I think the person to whom I'm replying has a valid point.]

I'm not sure, I copied that from the aws/aws-lambda-go repo https://github.com/aws/aws-lambda-go

> I'm only saying that it would take more effort and place more burden on a developer to figure out how to do all that in their programming language rather than just implement a function

But the average developer isn't going to do that, and won't need to. Within a week there would be more than one framework up on github to do the binding in their favourite language for them. Look at how many web frameworks there are.

> there would be more than one framework up on github

That's annoying, and something I hate about Javascript. There's no standard way to do it, so everyone has a different way of doing it.

I prefer that Lambda has sane, solid standard ways of doing things so if I have to move between projects I know what the heck is going on, rather than having to figure out which of the many homegrown ways of doing things people decided to use.

I wasn't actually thinking about JavaScript at all. It applies to all languages that I have looked at.

I cant see that being an issue here libraries for unofficial languages / runtimes would likely follow the same api as the official ones. There's precedent in the form of unofficial AWS SDKs...

I'm pretty sure anyone who programs Java for a living can start up Jetty via their favourite framework. It isn't as if lambdas are trivial to package either.

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