PayPal hardware powered by Go | Hacker News Reader

PayPal hardware powered by Go

groups.google.com

78 pointsSriniK25 comments

Awesome! It's great to see more large companies doing projects in Go.

What's even more awesome is that this is an embedded arm device where usually C/lua has rank.

Even with my famous design issues with Go, I find this project quite interesting.

The only way to move embedded development into safer languages is with real products developed in such languages, otherwise the hardcore C guys will never be convinced.

It cannot be generalized for all types of embedded hardware projects for sure, but the use of C, C++ and Assembly should be reduced to the bare minimum type of projects where no other technology is possible.

This project is super cool, but I'm even more hopeful for Rust eventually being a much more complete replacement for C++ and even C for embedded projects. It's already pretty easy to run outside the runtime by not using the standard library[0], though you can't take advantage of a lot of Rust's niceties if you do so. There's discussion of what it might mean to have the standard library but not the runtime[1], which could be really nice for embedded projects.

0: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/blob/master/src/test/run-pas... 1: https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-August/0051...

There are Pascal dialects, Ada and Oberon compilers for embedded systems, but sadly never got much traction in the industry.

excerpt from the author on go-nuts: "Writing in Go continues to be the best part of an all-around very interesting project."

Great! We at phdtree are considering switching from Python/Django to Go: http://phdtree.org

Yes, blatant spam is a great way to promote your project.

Yes, finally the riches a "not-for-profit, just-for-fun Wiki project" deserve will finally start rolling in! The only thing holding them back now is the amount of spamming they can do.

sigh I hadn't heard of phdtree, and was interested that they were considering moving from python to go. I totally see your point, but this forum is at its most useful to me when I'm hearing about software projects and the tech they're being built with, and sometimes self-promotion is in service of that.

By this sentiment would it be acceptable for phdtree to go to every article on hn that mentions golang and post an identical comment with a link to their project? If I have a project written in js should I post a link in articles mentioning js with, "Hey, my project is also using js: www.myproject.com!"?

Clearly not - have they done that? Javascript is a bad analogy because of its prevalence and entrenchment.

Perhaps a better way for me to have put my sentiment would have been, "I'm not tired of this, so I don't mind seeing it", where "this" means both phdtree specifically and hearing about project being written in, moving to, or considering moving to Go in general. Clearly you are tired of it, either from having seen other specific phdtree postings or from having seen more postings about Go in general than you care to. That's fine, but it's not where I'm at.

And when Go no longer feels as hip as Django once did, you'll switch again?

After some research we narrowed it down to Scala and Go, and eventually decided to go with Go! Scala has excellent Play! framework, but Go feels more like Python

Have you found a substitute for the Go equivalent of the Play Framework + MongoDB + ReactiveMongo [0] + precog [1]?

[0] http://reactivemongo.org/

[1] http://precog.com/

For Play: http://robfig.github.io/revel/

For Mongo: Most people use mgo http://labix.org/mgo

For precog: dont know, but there might be something, but probably not.

Thanks, I knew about Revel and mgo.

I just forgot to say: a FRP* [0] Go equivalent of Play and that there's nothing like these upcoming Coursera courses [1] [2] for Go with examples.

[0] http://www.reactivemanifesto.org

[1] https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun

[2] https://www.coursera.org/course/reactive

Interesting. I've never heard of precog does. What does one use precog for in practical terms?

It connects D3 and Quirrel to allow easy analytics.

If I may ask, why?

Are you bumping into some significant performance problems, for instance?

Nowadays, doing just about anything in Go makes it HN worthy.

It's a language that excites a lot of people. You get performance that isn't far off the mark of C++ or Java, while also not being that much more difficult than Python or Ruby, and as an added bonus, concurrency is a snap.

... plus you get a (output) binary with very few dependencies, easy cross compiling, nice tool chain (go fmt is great) and much more that are good arguments (for me) to use go.

... which is possible in lots of languages.

This Beacon device seems to be a wifi scanner detecting mac addresses of wireless phones... if it is using this technique, then it will not work with iOS 7 phones, as Apple has blocked the MAC address from the API.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com