🧮 Is new math in Go's future? Plus boot.dev update with Lane Wagner

This show is supported by you, our listener. Stick around till after the news to hear a little bit more about that. This is Cup of Go for 02/28/2025. Keep up to date with the important happenings in the Go community in about fifteen minutes per week. I'm Jonathan Hall.

And I'm not Shay. I'm Lane.

Hi, Lane.

How's it going?

Good. How are you?

Doing great. Glad to be here. Glad to be a guest host. Weird. Yes. But, you know, we're doing it.

Yeah. Yeah. So you've been on the show before. It's been a a while. Close to two years, I think.

Yeah. Probably coming up on two years. That's kinda crazy.

You're on episode number 16, May 15 20 20 three. Almost two years.

That's early. Yeah. That's awesome.

Yeah. Well, thanks for stepping in. Shai is middle of traveling. I don't know if he's in the air right now, but he's, migrating to The United States, this week. So too busy for him to to be with us today. So thanks for stepping in.

Yeah. Happy to do it.

Let's dive into some news. We have a few quick updates. I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail because we talked about these already. The big one you've all been waiting for, of course, is why did you upgrade your crypto packages on Monday? We talked about last week that a preannouncement had come out, but we didn't know what was in it.

I use those packages. Time to up time to up.

Did you update on Monday?

No. I need to update now.

You need to update now. Pause pause the show. Go update.

I'm, I'm I'm messaging my team right now.

Alright. The other update, for this week is, last week, we talked about the proposal for Net HTTP content negotiation. It was likely accept. Apparently, nobody who listened went in and threw rocks at them hard enough to get them to unaccept it because it's been accepted now. So if if you hate this proposal, sorry you had your chance.

Yeah. Yeah. Gopher camp in The Czech Republic. Let me pull it up so I don't screw anything up. But, yeah, Gopher camp, April twenty fifth twenty twenty five in oh, man. I don't that's an abbreviation. Is that Borneo?

I don't know how you pronounce it.

No. That's absolutely cool.

The full name.

There's no vowel at the start. Yeah.

Yeah. It must not be in English. So weird.

Yeah. Weird that the whole world doesn't run on English, I suppose. Yeah. The Czech Republic, fifty six days from now. So if you're if you're around the area or even if you're not, check it out. Go for Camp 2025.

I was in The Czech Republic very briefly. It was a beautiful place. I wasn't in Brno, I think, is how you say it. I wasn't there. But it's a nice country. So if if I were still in Europe, I would I would probably try to go, but I'm not.

Yeah. Not Borneo. That's an island. Alright. I was way off.

And I think their CFP is still open. So if you are in the area and want to speak there, you have until I don't know when you have until. There's no deadline listed here.

Yeah. The become a speaker button is still open as of time of recording, but I don't see a date at which it closes. So if you wanna speak, maybe just check it out as as quick as you can.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. I don't know when the CFP closes, but it's open right now. So or or call for speakers, call for whatever it is. Go submit your your talk. And we also have a new blog post from the official Go team about this is an interesting one because it's gotten a lot of attention. We talked about it without really going into any details on the show. But one of the biggest performance improvements in Go 1.24 had to do with how maps work. Do you understand what's going on here, Lane?

I have approximate knowledge of many things. Take whatever I say here with a huge grain of salt. I've just done some brushing up on Swift tables, specifically for this, so we'll see if I can do any sort of justice. I'm sure we're gonna link down to the actual article, right, on go.dev

Yes.

For those of you that want the correct interpretation. But so maps are, like, crazy tricky, is if you've ever taken an algorithms class, like, hash maps are, like, the simplest thing in the world to use, which is why we use them all the time. They're great and they're fast, key value pairs. And and you look under the hood and the implementation is like, oh, yeah. Actually, it makes sense that that would be really hard because You've got to, like, dynamically grow an array in memory.

Cool. Metadata for the win. Do you have any idea why it's called Swiss tables? I mean, is it because Swiss make good watches, or is it related to cheese, or or did a Swiss guy invent this?

I would imagine it's a Swiss guy. Let's let's look it up. Gipity is gonna

tell me, and with very approximate accuracy Yes.

Why why they're called Swiss tables. Accuracy Yes. Why they're called Swiss tables. To evoke the reputation of Swiss engineering. What?

Okay. So it's closer to the watchmaking, I guess, and

Yeah. Known for their, their clever engineering, I suppose.

So, Google's AI thinks that it's because they are, based on a design that originated in Switzerland. I don't I don't know if I believe that.

Also sounds like it could be approximately correct.

Yeah. Could be. We don't know. If you know if you know why Sys tables are called that, let us know, on our Slack channel. We'd love to know that little piece of trivia for next, Go trivia night.

I mean, performance improvements in Maps could be pretty huge. I mean, again, like, we use Maps all the time. So

Exactly. Yeah.

Pretty exciting. Yep.

Cool. Well, I wanna pull up, and talk about a blog post, that comes from Snyk. But they have a a blog post. It's a couple weeks old, but it's still relevant. It's it's more just a general informational one. It's about an example of or examples of SQL injection. This is something I think people hear about all the time. And if you're new to programming, not just Go. If you're new to programming, you might not really know what all the fuss is about. You know, what what is SQL injection?

I've ran into real life code that was vulnerable to SQL injection. I've never had an exploit on, like, my production database.

Yeah.

Yeah. I've never had, like, a little Bobby Tables. If you're new to SQL injection, you know, Google little little Bobby Tables x k c d. Never had that. But I have had instances where, like, this isn't SQL injection, but it's, I guess, related. You know, like, we didn't put limits on, like, a text column in Postgres, and then someone just, like, Zalgo fonted the database. And so you've got, like, you know, a row with a gigabyte of Zalgo font in it. And that's not a lot of fun to

Yeah. You

know, kind of brings down the ability to render a page. But no. Direct SQL injection stuff where they're actually modifying the query itself.

Yeah. I don't think I've had experienced the exploit either. I've definitely run into code very recently even where, you know, it's it was possible to exploit, but I haven't seen it exploited. I've definitely seen HTML injection in the real world where someone inserts some HTML into a field and we render it and then the whole page is bogus as a result. Yep.

Yeah. There's a reason we don't just give our users access to the SQL engine for our database.

That that's right. We already talked about some proposals, but I think you found one, that upcoming that's worth talking about. Tell me about math stats.

Yeah. So there's a new proposal for the math stats package to add things like median, mode, variance. It's GitHub issues 69264 on the Go repo. Yeah. Pretty interesting. I mean, adding very basic statistical, functionality to the math package. One thing that immediately stands out to me is, like, okay. I look at this. I'm like, I would use it. Mean, median, mode, variance set.

I didn't know that.

Yeah. It sounds like the Go team wants to keep the scope of the math package coupled to c plus plus, which is kind of, like, I I wonder why that that that doesn't seem obvious to me, like, that the c c plus plus is, like, achieved, you know, perfection in the math package. But I I mean, there there might be good reason for it. So I wonder if there's, you know, they're considering adding it somewhere else, aside from the the direct math package. But that is, interesting to know that's how they think about that.

That is interesting. Yeah. I wonder if if if that's the only package that's designed that way or if there are other packages that are intended to to mimic the c plus plus standard library or some other standard library. Is there a Python inspired, block package somewhere?

Yeah. I mean I mean, on that note, like so one of the reasons Python is so popular amongst, like, data analysts, data scientists is because of the rich, math support. But that's usually not in the Python standard library. That's like NumPy, SciPy. I wonder if the Go team has, like, a a similar philosophy where it's like, okay, maybe, you know, we're expecting other, like, extended packages to handle, like, statistical stuff.

Yeah. You know, one thing that frustrates me, and this is there are other libraries that do this, but I wish there was a a precise way to handle large decimal numbers in Go, particularly with, like, currency, addition and and and subtraction, stuff like that. You know, using a float is what most people reach for, but it's dangerous because it's not precise. So you end up using these weird, awkward

Have you used BigInts?

I've used that a little bit. I I'm using one called decimal right now, which uses BigInt in the background.

I hate to on Go. Mhmm. But good lord, BigInt is awful to work with.

Yes. I understand.

So we have a cryptography course on boot dev, and it use it has to use BigInt for some stuff. And just, you know, having to call, like, dot mol, dot div, dot, like, whatever, it's just so hard to read BigInt code because it doesn't operate. It doesn't use the normal operators out of the out of the box.

Yeah. So yeah. Anyway, there there I love Go, but there are things I don't like about it, and that's that's one of them. Speaking of how you, do things in Go, there's a topic on Reddit I thought it would be fun to talk about, before we close out the program. The title is how would you introduce Go routines and channels to someone new to Go? And I bet you have some thoughts on this. I'm curious how you do that on on boot.dev's courses.

Yeah. A lot of it depends on where they're coming from. So on boot dev, our students go through Python and then come into Go. So we can usually just kind of assume, like, a, you're familiar with Python.

Mhmm.

And the good news about Python is that concurrency in Python is pretty rough. So we usually assume they don't know too much about concurrency and kind of just teach it from the ground up. Concurrency is a hard thing to learn. Mhmm. Go's concurrency primitives are not.

I think there's a lot of, mystery around channels that it doesn't deserve. Like, I I think people feel like channels do something magical, but it's really just a data structure. Right? I mean, it's it's it's essentially an array with a built in push and pop that that's concurrency safe.

Yeah. Concurrency safe queue. That's like it.

Yeah. It's it. Right? But, you know, I mean, you you see questions and and I've had the questions too. I'm not blaming anybody for having these questions because I had them too. I I thought it was mysterious and and weird when I started from Indigo. So I completely identify with people asking the questions I'm about to mention, but questions like, what happens when a channel goes out of scope? The same thing that happens to anything else that goes out of scope. Right? It gets garbage collected.

Yeah. I I do think that, like, understanding blocking Uh-huh. Is is maybe, you know, a little nuanced because you're used to your code just, like, just going. Right? Like, code goes. But blocking is I mean, there's other instances where you could block, like, with a time dot sleep or whatever. But, like, yeah, the fact that the way you write your Go code on the receiving side is usually like, okay, now sit and block and wait until,

you

know, something happens. That's, like, probably one thing that's that's maybe a little specific to learn. The other thing that I will call out is the idea of, like, sending on a closed channel.

Yeah.

That can get really hairy really fast. And so there's, like, some good rules of thumb to make sure that that doesn't happen. But, man, if you have code written in such a way where, like, you know, you're closing the channel in one Go routine, then another Go routine is trying to send into it, Like, that can be a nightmare to get right.

Dealing with nil channels can also be challenging. I mean, it's it's not difficult, but you have to remember the details or look them up every time. I I really like what you said that concurrency is complicated, but it goes primitives or not, to paraphrase. It reminds me how easy it is to think you've written code that that looks right. It even appears to do the right thing, but you've missed race conditions or something like that because the primitives are so easy.

I I will say just, like, maybe one little tip is I I think the atomic package is generally underused.

Oh, yeah.

You can solve a lot of problems just using the atomic package that, like, you would otherwise have to introduce, like, a mutex for and

things like that. And it's become a lot more powerful in the last few versions with since, generic, related functions were added. Yeah. Cool. Well, I think that's I think that's the news for the week. I'm gonna put you on the spot, Lane. If you have time and interest, would you stick around till after the the break and talk, give us an update about boot. Dev?

Of course. Happy to.

Great. Wonderful. Well, stick around. We'll we'll have a little break here, and we'll be back in just a few minutes to talk about boot. Dev. Thanks Thanks for listening this week. Without Shai, I don't know what our Patreon, looks like. I don't know if we have new members. If you're new, thanks for subscribing on Patreon. Stick around till next week.

I couldn't tell you if you did.

If you were listening, would you expect me to say something else now? Like and subscribe. Smash that like button. That's that sort of thing.

Smash the like button. There you go. That's the one. Something didn't something felt off.

Yes. Alright. Well, stick around. Layne and I are gonna have a a short chat, about boot.dev. If you're not sure what boot dot dev is, definitely stick around. It's a fun learning platform. We'll talk about that in just a moment. Well, Lane, thanks for sticking around. I have played with boot. Dev. I think I live streamed a session on boot. Dev a couple a year ago maybe. It was a lot of fun. Sounds right. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a learning platform for back end developers. We teach, like, a full computer science, and back end development curriculum. Got 30 plus courses. It that particular learning track, the back end developer track, starts you in Python, teaches you some memory management in c, and then teaches you all the back end specific stuff in Go.

How many students do you have? Or is that number is that a number you're willing to share?

Yeah. Happy to share. So last I checked a few weeks ago, about 500,000 registered and about 24,000 paying members.

Cool.

And for that, like, just to understand that distinction, all the content on boot dev is free to read and watch. So Mhmm. Definitely can check it out. It's the interactive components of the site that are, for paid members after a certain, like, trial period of three chapters.

And the thing that's so that's unique about boot. Dev, at least from my perspective, isn't so much that it's a learning platform because there's there's lots of those out there. But the interaction has a sort of, fantasy Dungeons and Dragons sort of feel to it. Talk about that a little bit. What what what makes boot. Dev unique unique in that regard?

Yeah. That that is it's it's it's the game experience and just how kinda crazy hands on our courses are is is the differentiating factor, like I said. And and we have to have that because, like like I said, all the content's free. So if we didn't have that, we wouldn't have a, you know, we wouldn't have a business. But, yeah, we've got this, these various mechanics, things like, you know, a daily streak that you keep alive, quests.

Okay.

You know, if you're into the idea of, like, setting a half hour or an hour long study session.

Uh-huh. We've

got Boots, AI Bear Wizard. He uses the Socratic method to kinda help you through, your lessons. But, like, all that stuff is fun, and it's designed to help you stay engaged Mhmm. With your studies. The the thing that's most interesting from, like, to a more technical audience, in my opinion, is is the lengths we go through to make the lessons interactive because Yeah.

I remember that.

That's been the real differentiator kind of aside from just, like, the, you know, fancy gamification skin on everything.

Yeah. So, I mean, I've heard people talk. I mean, I had a mentor that I was, working with for a while who I think he heard about me on your podcast and and then and then looked me up and and hired me as a mentor for a while. And, you know, he was talking about how how fun it was to play boot. Dev and, you know, the the the the fantasy element was was great.

Yeah. So there's there's there there's more than this, but the the core types of lessons on boot dev, there's really three. There's well, okay. Really, there's two. There's ones where you write code in the browser.

Yeah.

That's causing all this pain. So that's been kind of the the secret sauce at least of that, of that interaction, the the the CLI that you install.

Cool. Cool. And if I'm not mistaken, you have courses written by a number of different people. You're not doing this by yourself. Is that correct?

So we have a team. There's 10 of us, on the team. I've written the I've, like, authored the majority of the courses. The team helps maintain and update them. We update them a lot. I think we're on, like, student reported ticket, like, 16,000 right now that we've closed.

And so this is, like, bugs or or inconsistencies or something that they report?

Occasionally, it's, like, bugs in the lesson. But more often than not, it's just like, hey. I wish this could be explained a little bit better. And so it's just, like, constant improvement of the material.

Okay.

But we have worked with some outside authors, Primogen, TJ de Vries. So Prime did our Git courses. And, actually, this is gonna be most interesting probably to your audience. We are just finishing up the Primogen's new course on the HTTP protocol where you actually build Uh-huh. Essentially the Golang HTTP package, really an HTTP server from scratch using only the TCP package.

Uh-huh.

It's like from TCP to HTTP, and that one's super fun. Just finished editing it. We're just getting the videos out now. So

Cool. Sounds exciting. Anything exciting in the pipeline that's worth talking about?

That's the big one. I will say that this one's probably gonna feel like betrayal to this audience, but, like, the other big project that's going out after that HTTP protocol course is the back end curriculum. So the back end half of the curriculum, will all be available in TypeScript as well as Go. Okay. So you'll get to choose your adventure.

I was expecting you to say Rust.

Yeah. Yeah. No. There's not not as much of a market for Rust. We found that a lot of our Go developers want to learn TypeScript usually so that they can be helpful on the front end side of the stack as well when they need to be.

Okay.

And there's just, I mean, there's just demand for TypeScript. But obviously, Go Go is still our primary language. We ship all our new stuff in Go, but we're kind of porting everything over to TypeScript as well as this kind of secondary option.

So You said the back end half. Your other half meaning the the more, like, infrastructure stuff? You don't you don't do front end stuff. Right?

Yeah. So the back end specific stuff. The first part of the learning path is basically computer science fundamentals. So Right. Algorithms, data structures, object oriented programming, functional programming, all that's done in Python.

Your your podcast is back end banter. Right? Correct.

Yep. What are the

chances of adding front end related stuff to boot.dev? Is is there no chance at all? Or is that gonna happen someday?

There definitely is a chance, but it's like the last thing on our priority list.

Okay.

We'd rather hit DevOps first. We'd rather hit infrastructure stuff first. We'd rather hit, you know, even data science, AI, data analysis, data engineering. Like, I'm so much more interested in in building content around that than front end. There's good front end courses out there. Like, I I don't think it's a travesty, whereas I feel like, you know, there's not as many good back end

courses. Especially in the in the browser. You can get tons of good back end books, but if you want the same sort of experience, I I I certainly haven't seen them for back end code. Is there anything else that, I should have asked you about boot dot dev that I that or or back end bands or anything else that you have going on that I should have asked and I didn't?

No. That's great. Check out the Backend Manser podcast. Check out Jonathan's episode. I believe it was episode four. It was, like, very early. Wow. And the Boot Dev YouTube channel, we publish our courses for free on the YouTube channel, like, total like, complete walkthroughs. So, again, like, if you're not interested in paid membership, which is totally okay. All our content's free, so feel free to check it out.

Well, you were the cohost today, and then I turned I I tricked you, did the and got you to be a an interviewee also, which means I get to ask you our our stumper question to all the interviewees we do. And I haven't prepared Lane for this at all. Usually, we give our interviewees a little heads up if this is gonna happen. So I we'll we'll see. Question is, who has been the most influential for you in learning Go?

I'm gonna cheat and pick two. Okay. Number one credit goes to my professor in college, Russ Ross, who also happened to be the author of the Black Friday markdown package Okay. Which was really awesome, used by Hugo for many years, I think, before they switched to Goldmark. I can't remember.

Great. Awesome. Great answers. Well, thanks, Lane, for stepping in for Shai, and thanks for chatting with with me about boot. Dev. It's been fun.

Thanks for giving me the chance.

We'll have you back on the show in, I don't know, a couple years maybe.

Sounds good. Every two years.

Alright. See you then.