Memory bloat? Do this. • The Applied Go Weekly Newsletter 2024-02-04
Your weekly source of Go news, tips, and projects
Whew! Two strange and busy weeks are now behind me. Two weeks of testing and tweaking, talking to tech support, tweaking again, weighing pros and cons, and finally deciding to move away from my mailing provider. Going forward, I send this newsletter via Buttondown.email. There are still a few quirks to be addressed, but overall I am super happy with the service.
- I can go much quicker from collecting news to finishing the draft, thanks to Buttondown's Markdown support.
- The newsletter now has a public archive (although I plan to build a separate one on appliedgo.net that includes all the past newsletters that would otherwise have been buried on my previous mailing platform that did not provide a public newsletter archive).
- And the newsletter has an RSS feed, for anyone who wants to subscribe without subscribing.
Talking about quirks, you might have noticed a "premium subscription" link at the bottom of the post. I played with Buttondown's features and enabled paid subscriptions, but I was not aware that this is a one-way change. I was unable to switch off the setting before sending that issue, but Justin and his team disabled that setting quickly and filed a fix. So everything is back to normal, and I am left being impressed by their swift support.
One of the next issues might already get sent via the API, removing another manual step from the process. Buttondown works so much better for my workflow, I don't know why I did not make the switch earlier.
(If you want to try out Buttondown, use this referral link to get $9 off the first month.)
But back to business, we have a lot of Go news to go through.
Go Memory Metrics Demystified | Datadog
Analyzing memory usage in Go is trickier than you may think. Felix Geisendörfer discusses the various approaches for collecting and analyzing memory metrics, from runtime/metrics to goroutine profiling.
Go Memory Metrics Demystified | Datadog
Type assertion vs type switches in Go
At least, Go has no type casts! Redowan Delowar is tired of asking LLMs over and over again about type assertion vs type switches, so he wrote down the essence of these. (Ironically, it's probably only a matter of time until LLMs digest this article into their digital neurons.)
Type assertion vs type switches in Go
What’s New in Go 1.22: slices.Concat
Another insider post about new features in Go 1.22. Carlana Johnson describes how she proposed and implemented slices.Concat().
What’s New in Go 1.22: slices.Concat · The Ethically-Trained Programmer
Podcast corner
Cup o' Go
Jonathan Hall and Shay Nehmad about Go 1.22RC2, the Go developer survey, Go Changes, two CLI tools, and one library.
Cup o' Go | A bunch 🍇 of grape things are happening
Go Time
Neil S Primmer & Benji Vesterby organized the Go Capture the Flag event ("a scavenger hunt for nerds") at GopherCon 2023.
Go Capture the Flag! 🚩 with Neil S Primmer & Benji Vesterby (Go Time #301) |> Changelog
Go tip of the week: How to get build information of a Go binary
A really quick one this week:
You surely know the command go version that returns the version of the installed Go command.
Here is another way of using it. If you pass the -m flag along with the path to a Go binary, go version lists the Go version used to build the binary, the dependencies, and the build flags used.
Like so:
> go version -m $(which gopls) 0s
/Users/christoph/.go/bin/gopls: go1.21.5
path golang.org/x/tools/gopls
mod golang.org/x/tools/gopls v0.14.2 h1:sIw6vjZiuQ9S7s0auUUkHlWgsCkKZFWDHmrge8LYsnc=
dep github.com/BurntSushi/toml v1.2.1 h1:9F2/+DoOYIOksmaJFPw1tGFy1eDnIJXg+UHjuD8lTak=
dep github.com/google/go-cmp v0.5.9 h1:O2Tfq5qg4qc4AmwVlvv0oLiVAGB7enBSJ2x2DqQFi38=
dep github.com/sergi/go-diff v1.1.0 h1:we8PVUC3FE2uYfodKH/nBHMSetSfHDR6scGdBi+erh0=
dep golang.org/x/exp/typeparams v0.0.0-20221212164502-fae10dda9338 h1:2O2DON6y3XMJiQRAS1UWU+54aec2uopH3x7MAiqGW6Y=
dep golang.org/x/mod v0.14.0 h1:dGoOF9QVLYng8IHTm7BAyWqCqSheQ5pYWGhzW00YJr0=
dep golang.org/x/sync v0.4.0 h1:zxkM55ReGkDlKSM+Fu41A+zmbZuaPVbGMzvvdUPznYQ=
dep golang.org/x/sys v0.14.0 h1:Vz7Qs629MkJkGyHxUlRHizWJRG2j8fbQKjELVSNhy7Q=
dep golang.org/x/telemetry v0.0.0-20231114163143-69313e640400 h1:brbkEFfGwNGAEkykUOcryE/JiHUMMJouzE0fWWmz/QU=
dep golang.org/x/text v0.13.0 h1:ablQoSUd0tRdKxZewP80B+BaqeKJuVhuRxj/dkrun3k=
dep golang.org/x/tools v0.14.1-0.20231114185516-c9d3e7de13fd h1:Oku7E+OCrXHyst1dG1z10etCTxewCHXNFLRlyMPbh3w=
dep golang.org/x/vuln v1.0.1 h1:KUas02EjQK5LTuIx1OylBQdKKZ9jeugs+HiqO5HormU=
dep honnef.co/go/tools v0.4.5 h1:YGD4H+SuIOOqsyoLOpZDWcieM28W47/zRO7f+9V3nvo=
dep mvdan.cc/gofumpt v0.4.0 h1:JVf4NN1mIpHogBj7ABpgOyZc65/UUOkKQFkoURsz4MM=
dep mvdan.cc/xurls/v2 v2.4.0 h1:tzxjVAj+wSBmDcF6zBB7/myTy3gX9xvi8Tyr28AuQgc=
build -buildmode=exe
build -compiler=gc
build DefaultGODEBUG=panicnil=1
build CGO_ENABLED=0
build GOARCH=arm64
build GOOS=darwin
HT to Jonathan Matthews.
Quote: Switch your ecosystem
Programmers must switch ecosystems at least once or twice in their career to gain truly “senior” experience. We’d all be better off if every JavaScript developer would work with Go for a year and then come back, every TypeScript developer with Ruby, every Ruby developer with Rust, and so on.
More articles, videos, talks
Beginner's Guide to Redis with Go! - YouTube
Get a crash course about Redis with Go from Elliot Forbes. In 11 minutes from zero to Redis.
Client-side pagination in Go (range-over function edition) - Vladimir Varankin
Vladimir Varankin uses the rangefunc experiment to refine his generic iterator that he made in 2022 for implementing client-side pagination.
Fun with Adaptive Rate Limiting
Based on a practical implementation for OpenZiti, Paul Lorenz explains how adaptive rate limiting helps minimize wasted work and maximize throughput across all requests.
Integration Testing In Go Using Testcontainers
Unit testing is baked into Go. Integration tests need to take the surroundings into account and hence aren't that straightforward. Shaibu Shaibu explains how to run integration tests in a scenario with a Go CRUD service, a Redis cache, and a PostgreSQL database using
testcontainers.
How Disney Hotstar Captures One Billion Emojis! - YouTube
How do you manage five billion(!) emoji reactions during a Cricket World Cup event? With Go, of course. To be fair, some credits also go to the distributed and scalable architecture.
Using Gemini models in Go with LangChainGo
Accessing Go's Gemini AI models from Go is now possible via LangChainGo. – By Eli Bendersky.
Projects
Libraries
Don Knuth's Art of Computer Programming isn't outdated at all. His Allotment Routing Table algorithm has been re-implemented in Go by Tailscale, which inspired Charly Gaissmaier to build a balanced version of ART with much lower memory consumption.
Manipulate Excel sheets with Go. WIP.
GitHub - maxnorth/nv: A .env loader with secret manager integration
Don't put secrets in environment variables or .env files. With
nv, environment variables can hold URLs to secret values, andnvwill invoke the appropriate secrets manager's CLI command to fetch the actual secret.
GitHub - stephanrotolante/go-lang-jpg-analyzer
When was the last time Rob Pike commented on your work? TIL: If something is already in the stdlib, this does not mean that it should not be re-implemented for fun and learning.
Tools and applications
GitHub - danvergara/morphos: Self-hosted file converter server
If you need a hosted file conversion service but want to stay away from 3rd-party services due to privacy concerns, here is an alternative for self-hosting.
GitHub - semanser/tinygo-wasm-webgl-demo: A basic tinygo-wasm-webgl demo
Is Go a good fit for Webassembly? The author of
tinygo-wasm-webgl-demothinks so. "I wanted to try running Go in the browser and came up with a very simple demo. I used the default Go compiler at first, but the .wasm file size was around 2MB. Surprisingly, switching to TinyGo didn't require any changes at all. It just worked, and as a result, the total .wasm bundle size is only 170kb now.
"Honestly, I'm surprised how good it is since everyone is only talking about Rust + Wasm combo. Will definitely continue to experiment more."
How do you measure the complexity of source code? A possible way is to calculate the Cyclomatic Complexity, which is a quantitative measure of the number of linearly independent paths through a program's source code.
cyclomatixis a tool that analyzes Go source code and produces a control flow graph in GraphWiz format.
Get notified via Slack or Discord when a long-running command finishes.
...where the Python-like language is Starlark.
GitHub - paulsonkoly/calc: Small functional language implemented in go
To write a compiler, you would typically reach out to the usual tools: lexer, parser, and so forth. Paul Sonkoly, not so much. Instead, he wrote a small functional language in Go with his bare hands, from scratch.
The idea: Generate config structs from YAML files. Advantage 1: Easily stay up to date with changes to the YAML structure. Advantage 2: Avoid search operations like
cfg.Find("A").Get("B")and use type-safe access likecfg.A.B.
GitHub - cel7t/TileEx: A Tiling Pattern Extractor written in Go
The art of making a tiled wallpaper is to disguise the edges of the base tile. The wallpaper then looks like a single, large pattern. This app extracts the base tile of PNG wallpapers and helps you uncover the secrets of their patterns.
Completely unrelated to Go
Sometimes, the choice of language DOES matter.
"No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens - Xe Iaso
Happy coding! ʕ◔ϖ◔ʔ
Questions or feedback? Drop me a line. I'd love to hear from you.
Best from Munich, Christoph
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