🎂 ¡Feliz quinceañera a Golang! 🪅

This show is supported by you, stick around till after the news to hear more about that. This is cup of go for November 15, 2024. Keep up to date with the important happenings in the Go community in about 15 minutes per week. I'm Jonathan Hall.

And I'm Shay Nehmad.

Hi, Shay.

I realized we always have the same Yeah. Wondering if we can slip in, like, different I'm Jonathan Hall, and this is a show about Rust, and people will just not notice. Right?

Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. Well, we'll try to mix it up for next time.

Yeah. Keep keep ears sharp. And also, your, train tickets sharp in case you're going to Hanover?

Oh, yeah.

That sounds like a trainee place, although I don't know if that's actually true.

Oh, I'm sure they have trains, that go.

Wait. Is is a place is a place that has a lot of train trains trainee or rail y? Because most of the time they have rails. Trainee is like if they have a lot of gyms. Anyway, talk about the meetup before I tell any more bad jokes.

Yeah. So there's a meetup happening November 19, in Hanover. So if you're in Hanover, that's, in Germany. We don't know what they're talking about. It'll be a mystery until you, go to the Hanover meetup. I'm sure it'll be a great conversation though.

Alright. Let's not make it too awkward. Everybody together now. Happy birthday to you.

You know, when they tell when they sing it

to you and you're just sitting there, you're like, yeah. Just don't know what to do.

And it's worse at a restaurant when the waiters and waitresses come out and start doing that.

I would die. I would die. I was just to get up and leave. Go turns 15. Blog posts on the Go blog. Happy birthday, Go.

This is the big one. This is the quinceanera for Go.

A quinceanera? What does that mean?

Quinceanera is a traditional celebration when a girl turns 15 in Latin America. She gets in a formal dress and

They already passed the bar mitzvah, so now it's quinceanera, next is 18. But, yeah, this blog post, goes deep into changes from the last 5 years and really highlights for me the longevity of, like, the language and processes and the leadership of the language. Right? Because you see, they planned the things 5, years in advance and then, you know, change, for forward loops is part of a 5 year trajectory. Right?

Tiny bit, like, 10 lines or something. Yeah. Yeah.

And the thriving community. And I definitely feel a part of that community.

Definitely a part of that.

Yes. So you're welcome, Go. Actually, that's an interesting question. Do you feel a language is such a weird concept? Right? Because it's first and foremost a business thing. Right? It's a business tool developed by Google. Mhmm. Do you feel like you gained more from Go or gave more

to Go? Oh, I've definitely gained more from Go than I've given back to it. For sure. I mean, well, okay. Actually, maybe that's more interesting question than I first thought.

I think because Go, like, it is a Google thing, but, like, I'd never felt Google, monetized it and it never pulled me towards Google that much. Like, the biggest thing I can think of is the AI, blog post from very recently. They were, like, they mentioned the Vertex before they mentioned the Azure and AWS and OpenAI for, like, AI applications. And maybe the fact that a lot of Go cloud things are protobuf and Go, so that sort of draws me there, but, like, not really. It doesn't feel like a corporate thing.

Yeah. I I mean, I haven't been using it for 15 years, so that's probably part of why it feels younger to me. But but also just, like, sort of the vibe around the language. It still kinda feels new and

shiny. Yeah. Maybe, actually, just looking at how hard it is to change a single thing about a for loop that bothers everybody takes, like, 5 years. Maybe it's not that young as I we're thinking of it. Yeah. Not a spring chicken anymore. Happy quinceanera go. There are still a lot of interesting things to discuss. Let's get on it.

I wanna call attention to a talk that was done, at Govergogon recently by Cameron Balahan. I think I said that right, who is I believe the product manager for the Go team. He did a talk that, it's really relevant to what you were just talking about called the business of Go and he talks about how, they balance business requirements for Google and the rest of the and how that interacts with the rest of the community. Like they don't wanna build Go just for Google. It really needs to be something that's used by the community.

Alright. I'm I'm adding it to my to do. I'll definitely watch it. But first, I wanna finish listening to this episode. So let's finish recording it.

There'd be a cassette of baseballs, the movie. We're still in the middle of making it. Oh, that's true, sir. What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie? Now. You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now is happening now. What happened to then? We passed then. When? Just now. Wear it now now. Go back to then. When? Now. Now? No. I can't. Why? We missed it. When? Just now. When will then be now? Soon.

Alright. Some updates on past news items. Support for Mac OS 11 in Go 125 has been accepted. No surprises there really. Just if you are building for Mac OS 11, remember to upgrade. You should always upgrade to the two versions before the one that's coming out. Right? Can you remind us what's the life cycle, thing in Go?

Two versions.

The current Two versions from since what?

Well, so the current the current version and the one before that.

These are okay. And the previous ones are not getting security updates anymore, so you don't wanna stick around with them. Right. Cool cool cool. A more interesting discussion is about memory regions. Yes. So we're gonna try to, go a bit deep into this one. And if you remember, we already discussed a similar topic when we talked about arenas. The arena experiment that was introduced in go something?

Yes. It was definitely go something.

I don't remember.

I don't remember.

But I think it was like 3 versions ago. Yeah.

It was like 1 20 or maybe 19. I don't remember.

Yeah. So, just to refresh your memory, also this, whole discussion is about memory. What is what was the arena experiment? So let's say you have a workload that needs to, allocate data and you don't want the garbage collector to collect this data. You wanna do it yourself.

Right.

In Go arenas, first of all, are pure Go and second of all, it's a memory safe implementation. And so far as use after freeze will not result in corruption, only crashes. So you still can shoot yourself in the foot, it's just with a Nerf gun and not with a shotgun. Right? It's gonna crash, but you're not gonna introduce security vulnerabilities or corrupt the memory or things like that, which is better.

Me? I've used, the JSON encoder or decoder, FMT, of course.

Oh, so so f m like, JSON is really a good idea. Let's say you, want to decode into a buffer and you just wanna reuse that buffer all the time and manage that memory because the JSON is always gonna be the same and blah blah blah. Right? Mhmm. You don't want the garbage collector to mess with it at all. You wanna define an arena. How would you tell JSON that you that you want to pass an arena and not just a pointer? Now you need to change the the API.

I I would have yeah. I don't know. I I could imagine a couple different ways. One is changing the JSON API. Hopefully, that's not what they do. Hopefully, there's like, an IO reader or writer wrapper around some data in that memory, arena or or

Then you need to change the API for IO reader and writer to make them accept arenas. So there there are a few, rough edges. Basically, for an API to use arenas, it must accept the arena to allocate into. Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Because if you pass a pointer into JSON, that's fine. But if JSON, allocates, some memory itself, then you need to pass the arena, to allocate into.

Right.

This is, in a sense, this is why sometimes, Rust APIs look so rough, right, where you have to define it's a box, an RC with a static lifetime, blah blah blah blah blah blah. It's because every API needs to know exactly what it what's it allocating into. Anyways, this is not a perfect analogy. And if you're listening, this is not a perfect analogy. I just don't like Frost APIs.

The this is the the sort of the problem.

Right? This is why we're talking about it. So the problem is arenas work, but in order to use them, they compose really poorly with the API. So let's say I I don't wanna resolve it by doing the API. Right?

I agree the API is is dead simple. I'm curious how it works with things like global variables and and I don't know. This is some quarter cases. I'm sure they've thought about this or they will have at least by the time this is accepted. So I'm gonna have to read this in more detail. But I guess TLDR, it looks ingenious. I I have questions.

So although this is fairly fleshed out, this doesn't have a prototype yet. And now they want to gauge interest from the community. This is difficult. Right? This is not gonna be easy to implement, and it's gonna mess up a ton of things.

I think improving the the GC is great, but it's already pretty darn good. And I can definitely think of cases where I would you like, I would have probably used something like this last week if it was easy and accessible to me. So, yeah, I I don't know why you wouldn't wanna support both if if it's reasonable.

So, a, the zero sum game of if you're gonna use if you're gonna do something, do that. I don't this is not a productive discussion in my opinion. I do wonder. There's no I feel like I already have a sense when I look at a Go API whether I should oh, it's a super common API or a package. Right?

I I I can think of some features ago I never use. I don't know if these are what I was thinking of when I made the comment.

So anyway, what I'm saying is, like, it's sort of the case, I feel at least, that if you don't like manual memory management, manually managing your memory is what I meant to say, you cannot use it. But on the other hand, I'm thinking about it and saying, oh, but if they introduce arenas or like sorry, these are called memory regions and suddenly, you know, someone has a really really cool suggestion for, GC optimization and like, ah, but it doesn't work with memory regions so we can't, we can't implement it or we can't introduce it. It it does feel like it could introduce a lot of dependencies and edge cases, etcetera, etcetera. But it's it's super interesting. Really, really super interesting.

So, Sean, you found a job listing that you wanted to talk about. This is a software engineer l 5 listed on LinkedIn. It's a Netflix job. Why did this jump out at you?

Well, the Netflix logo obviously is very recognizable, but I actually found it because I just looked for the word go on LinkedIn, and I didn't I forgot it was a jobs website. Like, the first thing it brought up was jobs. And then I saw games, and I remembered I don't know. I heard some asshole on a podcast saying that Go is not good for games. So what's the point?

So, anyway, the point here then is that, Netflix at least thinks that, somebody who knows how to use Go can help them write games.

Well, let's be fair. It's not a a full Go gig. Right? It's a full stack.

Full stack. It says go JavaScript TypeScript. And yeah. That's cool.

Do you think it's a good fit? Do you think it's a bad fit? What's your opinion?

So I just had a call this morning, with somebody who, a potential client who may have me helping them build the back end of a, a web based game for Telegram and Go. The back end would actually handle all of the game logic. The front end would just display images and stuff like that. So it's not it's not like, 3 d gaming or, you know, we're not talking about Call of Duty here, but, I do think there's a lot of room for Go to do that sort of stuff. And I may, within the next few months, have a lot of experience with it.

There are a lot of interesting edge cases when developing games that aren't relevant to, like, real workloads. And the first one I always think of is is maps. Right? You you're not allowed to give every you don't want the client side to show or hide enemies. So you need to know the client needs to tell you where it stands.

Yeah. Yeah.

I actually don't play a lot of shooters. So

And I'm doing I've been working for a couple years, almost, with Unity. They use Go for their, their CMS stuff. So I don't know if they have I don't know if they manage their own game back ends, but, certainly, they use Go even at Unity, which is not a Go library.

For sure. So, obviously, this is not we're not we don't wanna do job listings in the show because that's gonna be a problem. But I just found it interesting. Another place where Go is relevant for games, and I, was humbled by the listeners when, I said Go is not a good fit. Apparently, it is. Alright. Off to the lightning round.

Let's do it. Run out the

show. Lightning round.

First off, let's talk about Watermill. Watermill 1.4 has recently been released. Watermill is event driven apps. And go. We'll have a link here to a blog post talking about it and what it's for. It's apparently pretty popular at 7,500, stars on GitHub and 55 contributors. If you're interested in event driven development, check out Watermill.

Very cool. It's always a good topic to be interested in. If you're doing event driven stuff, that probably means you want, things to be idompetent and happen 1 by 1 and a really good package we've been using a lot of work. Well, package. It's a go file in the sync library.

Yeah. Are you familiar with Brain Rot? I mean, I don't we know what happens when you don't have coffee.

Yeah. For sure. I think I'm too old. Yeah. I know some of these words, like ratio. I know ratio. It's it's when you, like, comment on someone's tweet a bit too much, and it overtakes the likes. So it's like, oh, ratio, but not a lot beyond that.

Well, this blog post is about how to create a brain rot language server using go. So if you're familiar with, the concept of a of a language server, LSP language server protocol, which is basically the language that, tools like go please speak to Versus code, for example, You can read this through this blog post and learn how to sort of build a prototype or a working example, brain rot language server using Go. So it's it's an exercise in learning how language servers work.

Oh my god. For real for real. This library is all rizzed up. Bet, ain't no cap. It's very good because there's a literally a map called map string to brain rot entry and every brain rot entry is a term in the description. So this is actually a good way for me to learn about the youth of today.

Which are big brain rot. Are they older or younger than Go at this point?

Oh, you know what? There might be listeners who were who are super strong developers in Go, I'm sure, or younger than Go at this point listening to the show.

If that's you, come let us know on the Slack channel.

Or or maybe not. Maybe the Oh, maybe not. Broadcast the fact that you're a minor on the Internet. Maybe that's not a good idea.

Yeah. We'll we'll wait 3 years to to do that challenge. For sure.

If you wanna put in that line of code, right, you can put it in now and then it's gonna go through, like, 2 versions of of, forward compatibility and then 2 versions of releasing it. It's gonna be around your birthday. Alright. That's it for the news today. Let's move to the ad break. Let's do it.

First off, in the ad break, I have one thing I wanna talk about, Shay. I don't I don't think you've even seen it yet, but I created a new LinkedIn page for the podcast.

So you can fight maybe you can post, as the company when you fight with people. So it's not it looks more legitimate.

There's nothing on the page yet, except our logo. But, when I have a chance

The old logo that is because you're using the bad PNG.

Which is the same one that's on, kapako.dev apparently. Anyway, we intend to automatically publish every episode to that page like we already do on Mastodon and Twitter. So, if you're if you prefer LinkedIn over other social media, be sure to follow our LinkedIn page.

And even if you don't really like LinkedIn, like myself, hopping on and, like, pressing follow and, I don't know, re what's it called? Reposting? Retweeting? Sure.

Yeah.

Reposting. Reposting, like, the first thing we'll put here, it would be really cool because LinkedIn is a professional network, and I think it might be a good place to meet some other, people and, like, get more listeners to the show that we sort of haven't exposed the show to before. Right? So that could be cool. You have a really, like, big LinkedIn presence.

LinkedIn is my go to social media, not because I particularly like LinkedIn, but I I hate it less than the other options.

That's a that's a good reason to

I actually just deleted my my Twitter profile, a week or two ago because, I was so tired of being spammed on there.

Good for you, question mark?

I don't know.

It's all good. I I I, unfortunately, have to stick with my Facebook account, because it's connected, stupidly, it's connected to my Stack Overflow account. So I don't wanna lose that. Maybe I can reach out to support and say, like, hey. I wanna delete my Facebook. But I don't know. Maybe Facebook is useful for some things.

Maybe we need a Facebook page for Cup of Go

2. No.

I haven't used Facebook in years. I mean, I still have an account, but I don't use it. So, anyway I think it's enough about it.

I think it's true for everyone. Alright. Other than reaching us via LinkedIn, we wanna say a lot of thanks to our Patreon supporters. Thank you, fam. That's very lit of you.

Yeah. It is.

If you're into email, that's solely cool. News atcapago.dev. That is news atcapago.dev, and you can send us an email.

We would also appreciate if you would leave a review or a rating for us wherever you listen to this podcast, whether it's on, Spotify or Apple Music or iTunes. Is that

the same thing? Apple Podcast.

Apple Podcasts. Yeah. I'm not a I'm not in the Apple ecosystem, so I just.

Yeah. If listeners haven't heard, John uses Linux. He just wanted to mention.

You mentioned that far more than I did. Alright. Yeah. So leave us a review. Leave us a rating. Send us your feedback.

Thanks a lot for listening. That does it for our show this week.

Program exited. Goodbye.

Program exited. Goodbye.