I have recently watched Larry Hastings talk about Removing Python's GIL: The Gilectomy that has been recorded at PyCon 2016. Larry very graphically outlines the problems from not having proper concurrency features. He also tells a nice story on how the Python community is struggling with this situation for the last 24 years.

A few years ago I personally attended a talk delivered by Tony Hoare. Amongst other things I very much enjoyed his remarks on performance. I hope I will never forget and never fail to act on his famous quote "premature optimization is the root of all evil". I have seen the horrible results of hand optimizing Go code by default and I want to avoid that my codebase looks anything like that. Today I like to get started with some performance checks of the Go codebase I have been working on. Of cause I start with some profiling...

When I start a new project I begin by working on the interfaces like command line, services, plugins, etc. (the APIs). Once my API draft is good enough, I started writing tests. And I had to find out recently that Testing in Golang takes a little bit more attention than usual. Workarounds for bad design like mocking and monkey-patching are not readily available in Go like they are in dynamic languages. Many testing remedies are already available in Golang that promise to ease the pain but the general advice is not to use them. Instead one should make ones code testable and use the standard testing tools that are shipped with Golang itself. As always tools are a matter of taste and personal preferences - I wanted to do it in the recommended way.

If I am about to implement something it usually turns out to be a good idea to first start with some prototypes & benchmarks. This post summarizes the outcome of such an experiment to read data from compressed tar archives effectively. I did some similar benchmarks about 30 month ago so I repeated the measurements to see if there have been improvements and added results for my new Go reader.

Last weekend I went to DotGO conference. Go was publicly released by Google on 10th of November 2009. So happy 6 Birthday to all who worked on the success of this fine programming language! It was great beeing part and celebrating the 6th aniversary of the Go Community.