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Comment by plf | Hacker News Reader

Aside from being interesting and a new thing to learn, is Go used extensively in the professional world?

For network programming I've often used Python + Twisted + ZMQ, what are the most commonly used alternatives?

I'm developing a DNS hosting service (http://slickdns.com) and am using Django to do the bulk of the development, but I've also written a little utility web server in Go as it needs to be high performance but also lightweight and Go fits the bill perfectly. Updates are also a breeze as it's just a single static binary, compared to Django/Python where I have to make sure that any 3rd party dependency packages are installed first.

Last week I also developed a little random password generating web server with a web service API in Go. It's live at http://random-password-please.com/, and the source is at https://github.com/jbarham/random-password-please. IMHO it's a good illustration of how easy it is to write network servers in Go as it makes use of goroutines and channels and it all fits together very easily and naturally.

I use Go very heavily for "duct tape" in production, combining processes like machine vision, VNC clients, and video transcoding into a uniform internal API. It has been conceptually a lot easier to work with than my native Python since it offers better (for me) abstractions and a very manageable concurrency model.

Using Go in a professional setting really isn't a technical challenge. The biggest concern is if you have to grow your team, you're either going to have to teach Go (which isn't that hard -- I've seen two different people come from dynamic languages and pick the basics up in a week) or hire people who know Go (often already happily employed).

To further mangle Charles V: "I speak Spanish to God, German to my horse, and Go to connections that might make me wait."

Here's a list of a few organizations that are using Go: http://go-lang.cat-v.org/organizations-using-go

You might find that the blocking style of Go networking code is far less mind bending than using twisted.

Yes, and the beautiful thing about it, is that the blocking calls you make are actually implemented as evented IO. This is great when you have a large number of goroutines; it keeps it very fast!

All I/O is evented I/O. It's just that with modern I/O requirements it's too expensive to use a whole thread to wait for the event.

Wait, what? Do you have any references for that? My impression was that Go creates new threads for new Goroutines when the current ones are blocked. Is that not how it works?

The goroutine is a user-thread, Go can create as many threads as there are cores and schedules user-threads inside these threads without the programmer managing that, you just create goroutines. When a goroutine "blocks" it schedules out from the thread and another can replace it.

http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#goroutines

The Go runtime creates new threads to run goroutines when a thread is blocked making a syscall. The net package avoids having too many threads blocking on syscalls by using epoll/kqueue etc. for socket I/O.

Go is very new language, so I doubt its currently being used much outside Google.

Answering your second question, almost every good programming language has some good networking libraries. Choice of language usually depends on what you are building and what are your requirements.

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