Since I began to work a CloudWatt, I’ve been quite busy and I didn’t wrote a thing. Today, this will change, I have learned so much in 6 month, I HAVE to share !
CloudWatt is a public cloud provider. behind this words, it’s a instance of openstack delivering virtual private servers for its customers.
I’ve learned a lot and today I’ll talk about my journey with the GO programming language.
My first project in GO
There’s two main reason for me to learn more about GO. The first one is the fact that some people, friends and colleague talk about this language regularly. and the second one, some project I like are written in GO.
Project like wego of Goaccess are written in GO and save me everyday.
I decided to start my own project, and created friend-bots.
Through this simple exercice I can explore some of the language basic feature:
- Basic syntax
- Compilers
- Source code linter
- Packaging
- Libraries
- Community surrounding the language
- … etc…
Result
Let’s take a tour with me.
I’ll start with a negative point, its basic syntax. It may be confusing at first and I find it less readable than Python. It’s not a big issue because we can write correctly and produce readable code anyway (I had to mention this).
But then, all the good parts. First, let me talk about the “default” command line client for GO. This command line is a wrapper, like GIT and it allow the users to launch several tools.
With this single entry point, the command go gives you :
- The linter, it will format your code properly
- The compiler to build a valid executable file
- The packaging manager to download and manage external libraries
- It run your tests !
- This command also let you run your code (a build and run shortcut)
And I didn’t to learn or do some crazy stuff to have all of that working, the most difficult part was to set up the GOPATH environement variable and modify PATH.
Afterward, I can speak about libraries and packaging. GO can handle several versioning system like GIT, you just have to name your library and give a URL where your system can fetch the specified library :
import irc "github.com/fluffle/goirc/client"
You can note here, I’m importing a module called goirc and naming it irc.
But, I had to mention it too, there’s one issue with this. A few days ago, a library migrated from code.google.com to github.com. So travis could not built my project anymore as he couldn’t retrieve sources.
I made a pull request to fluffle and change the import line as below.
import irc "github.com/gentux/goirc/client"
This story is a bad point for me, we are using internet resources for internal code, and it might break anytime.
Conclusion
I could talk more about GO, but I really think you should give it a try if you want to learn more :)
This is a great tool for every small components you might need. You can build an executable file for every platform and deploy it very fast.
Bye, and happy hacking !