Talk that was held January 12. at Poligon for the second Ljubljana golang meetup

1. How We Became A 'Go' Company

2. ●
Highly-threaded scalable server software,
●
Recalling C++ as the choice to go,
– Alternatives: java, c#, c
●
So … C was chosen
– With proper enterprise support (using XML)
Previous Decade

3. ●
creating tons of threads (couple of hundreds)
●
memory management hell,
●
thread hell,
●
codebase grew uncontrolled much of the time,
●
(too) much of the time was spent on fixing segmentation faults (mostly
memory management issues)
Two Years Ago

4. We Needed A Hero ...

6. ●
Personally toyed with the language a bit before 1.0 release
●
Fast, concurred and minimalistic,
●
Based on a true story:
me: “hey, what if we try this 'Go' thing?”
boss: “okay, let's make a prototype”
… two weeks later …
me: “here's the prototype”
boss:
Go Language

7. ●
Working prototype had 26% less code, fully garbage collected
– some performance penalty (binary network protocol, reflection),
– smooth learning curve, small specs, C-family language
●
Next-generation server software 100% written in Go
– debugger-less programming,
– no memory issues at all,
– resulting in 42% less code,
– most of the time, things just work ...
Go Language

8. Go Language
Okular NetworkManager
Gateway
socketsocket
socket
Okular NetworkManager
Gateway
ZMQ message bus
(other components)
Unix socket-based IPC
ZeroMQ-based IPC

9. ●
Some projects have short life-span
●
web framework paradise (goweb, web-go, martini, revel, negroni),
●
lesssion learned: choose dependencies very carefully
●
Language changes can break dependencies
– Go 1.3 CGO changes totally broke Gtk+ 3 bindings
External dependencies

10. ●
Go 1.3 won't allow referring to an incomplete C type from one package
to another
– Package a: func CallC() *C.some_struct
– Package b: res := a.CallC()
●
Solution: encapsulate C types inside a struct
●
Fixing the problem:
– hot-fixing in our fork,
– cooperating with project maintainers
Things Can Also Go Bad

11. ●
Often discussed topic,
●
Community moves towards godep,
●
Tons of other solutions
(https://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/PackageManagementTools)
●
We use git subtree:
– early solution to vendor locking,
– easy to pull latest code
Dependency Management

12. ●
Binaries without external dependencies work on every compatible
system
●
In reality, one build for one system
●
Tests simply run after build and before packaging (w/o extra web
services)
– fails are still properly reported
Deploying

13. ●
don't regret nothing
●
most of the software is now written in Go (including the whole server
software and various web back-ends),
●
our python/nodejs devs love Go – prefer Go for some projects
The End

14. Visionect
• Developing electronic paper
products since 2007
• 20 employees focusing on
epaper development
• 11 international awards

15. Signage solutions developed by
Visionect have been working for
more than 2 years, and stretch
from ice-cold Alpine ski resorts to
scorching hot Australian roads.
Visionect is the only company in the
world with extensive
outdoor electronic paper
experience.
Visionect d.o.o.
www.visionect.com
Luka Napotnik
luka.napotnik@visione
ct.com