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Comment by donebizkit | Hacker News Reader

Last month I picked NodeJS and build couple of sites with it. This month, I want to pick up something new. I was hesitating between Python and Go. Can you answer couple of questions about Go from someone coming from NodeJS:

1- What is the state of the external Go libraries, especially DB (MySql), caching libraries (memcached), protocol libraries (Oauth). Are they stable 100%

2- How easy is logging and tracing in go?

Thanks.

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Memcached's author (Brad Fitzpatrick) is a Go user, and wrote a memcache client for Go.

Go has a bunch of good stuff surrounding SQL. I haven't used MySQL, personally, so I can't comment on which MySQL driver is best, but I know YouTube uses Go for something related to MySQL, though I can't say for certain exactly what. http://code.google.com/p/vitess

The goauth2 (http://code.google.com/p/goauth2) library is written by Brad Fitzpatrick and Andrew Gerrand (two members of the Go team), and is stable.

Logging is great. Interfaces make it really, really flexible. I'm not sure what you mean by tracing. Stacktraces? Those are easy to retrieve: http://golang.org/pkg/runtime/debug/#Stack

Well, Go has a bunch of libraries for different SQL servers. I wouldn't go so far as to say it has lots of good SQL stuff; it's in approximately the same place as C is w.r.t. databases.

Having to interface with complicated SQL is a reason not to use Go (but not an insurmountable one).

> it's in approximately the same place as C is w.r.t. databases.

I think the existence of a standardized interface like `database/sql` makes things strictly better.

An anecdote: I started making a new web application using MySQL. As soon as I realized the error of my ways (not because of the driver), I swapped out a single import from the MySQL driver to the PostgreSQL driver, and everything continued to work as it did before.

[EDIT] Anyone care to explain the down-votes?

The downvotes are likely because they're reading your MySQL-to-Postgres anecdote as the firing of a shot in an unrelated battle many love to hate, if not a mild troll.

Ah, right. My bad. The folly is still fresh, and there is still a bit of pent-up rage that I hadn't made this discovery sooner.

I think it has lots of good SQL stuff just because I think it laid a nice foundation for developers to build SQL libraries on, and I think there's a lot of potential for using SQL in Go to get dramatically better in the next year or so. That said, I'm not an SQL expert or even very competent, so I'm probably not the best to comment on it--I just included it for the sake of addressing all the points.

I would agree, though--working with SQL is the worst part of the software I'm currently writing in Go. I think that's more a praise of working with Go than a condemnation of its SQL support, though.

Brad Fitzpatrick is not just a Go user, he is a core Go developer :-).

Yeah, I noted that later on in the comment. :)

There's also the mgo library for MongoDB which is probably one of the best Mongo libraries out there (even 10gen thinks so): http://labix.org/mgo

And http://github.com/lib/pq for Postgres.

I'm the author of memcache client and server in go [1]. The client is much faster than bradfitz's client when serving hundreds of simultaneous workers - try comparing them with go-memcached-bench [2]. There is also memcache server [3] written in go, which can cache much more data comparing to the original memcached thanks to ybc library [4].

[1] memcache client and server library https://github.com/valyala/ybc/tree/master/libs/go/memcache [2] go-memcached-bench https://github.com/valyala/ybc/tree/master/apps/go/memcached... [3] go-memcached https://github.com/valyala/ybc/tree/master/apps/go/memcached [4] ybc library https://github.com/valyala/ybc

Python and Go are my languages of choice. I have found both share a the philosophy of less typing is more and more standard library is more. For web apps I have found Python has everything I can think of and more as far as third party libraries. Go package management and deployment once I got it I wondered how I could ever live without it. 1 - SQL is supported by Go specifically MySQL has a couple of drivers to choose from. After using sqlalchemy [1] everything else I have ever used just seemed like the dark ages. 2 - Go logging is standard and has been a couple third party options depending on your tastes. Tracing I think you mean stack is pretty amazing when my app crashes it is as easy to debug as any VM (JVM, Python VM or Ruby VM).

Python gives me a lot of choices based on the type of application I am building monolithic (DJango) or light (Bottle) and many package management and environment setup tasks (as with Rails, Java nightmares ect). Go on the other hand takes care of all the package management and environment setup almost non existent. YMMV good luck. [1] http://www.sqlalchemy.org/

Can someone tell me why they would use memcached over redis? Isn't redis a superset of memcached? I don't see a use case for memcached anywhere in a stack any more.

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