This week I have attended to the dotGo2016 conference in Paris. It is a one-day, one-track, 20-minutes-per-talk conference. Very few laptops, people were really focused attending to the dense talks. Here I will highlight some concepts that I have found interesting in some of the talks:
Dave Cheney(@davecheney) talked about first class functions (Don’t fear the first class functions), how to implement them in Golang and why they are sometimes a good choice because of the advantages of passing behaviour (encoded in functions) over raw data structures. You can find the example code here. Some examples are inspired by Bryan Boreham’s An Actor Model in Go talk from Golang UK 2016 conference.
Damian Gryski(@dgryski) discussed about bottlenecks in memory access time, showed some performance metering examples with kcachegrind and perf and stated the importance of trying to code in a way that processor cache usage is maximized. I have recently heard about a similar concept (Mechanical sympathy) and I find it quite appealing.
Dmitri Shuralyov (@shurcool), contributor to GopherJS, discussed about the origin and motivation of the project, the evolution of it and the pending features.
Péter Szilágyi (@peter_szilagyi), core developer at the Ethereum blockchain-powered platform, talked about how Immutability in Go helped them cope with the attacks to their platform.
Lucas Clemente (@luke_r2d2) presented the QUIC protocol and his package quic-go to use it. It is great that the library presents an interface really similar to net/http. And nice to learn that Caddy can run with a -quic flag!
Jaana Burcu Dogan (@rakyll) gave a lightning talk about Codegen Inspection. I recommend you to check the slides and find out how to disassemble your binaries and examine them.
Elias Naur (@elias_naur), contributor to Go Mobile, showed the power of the integration between Golang and Java/.Net (in both directions) for mobile apps development.
Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) presented kargo, a proof-of-concept library he has developed to allow golang binaries to self-deploy to kubernetes without any additional files or commands. Entertaining as always, with a vibrant demo, although I do not see a practical application, I follow his reasoning on the possible use case of self-deploying applications.
Javier Fernández Provecho (@javierprovecho) gave a lightning talk about skimming your binaries and shaving some extra megs with ldflags and UPX tools.
Rhys Hiltner(@rhyshiltner) showed some performance metering tricks with pprof and the go tool trace
Katrina Owen (@kytrinyx) explained both how do they injected testing in a project when debugging an issue and also the flocking pattern for refactoring (although she managed not to use the word refactoring), based on finding similarly-shaped patterns and iterating the abstraction until an acceptable result is found, rather than doing an upfront redesign
Brad Rydzewski (@radrydzewski), creator of Drone CI, explained several patters of pluging integrations in Golang:
- Embedded plugins (such as in Caddy web server)
- Net Plugins (such as in Hashicorp, Docker… products), via RPC
- RPC plugins using streams (powered by
os/execandstdinandstdoutredirection) - Net Plugins + docker run: a way to achieve maximum isolation, at the cost of worst performance. This is the model for the Drone CI plugin system.
Matthew Holt (@mholt6) explained how ACME protocol works and why it is so important and such a game-changer for certificate management.
Finally, Robert Griesemer gave a master talk on how to prototype using Golang, following the example of a new syntax allowing multi-dimensional index operators, powered by a transformation of the AST using a toolchain with go/parser and go/printer. Great!
Bonus: Florine Pigny live-sketched the conference here, through these pictures you can get a sense of the place and the atmosphere.