Thunder Talks

Speakers

The thunder talks are the second round of lightning talks from many speakers.

Note: This post was live-blogged at dotGo 2017. Let us know on Twitter (@sourcegraph) if we missed anything. All content is from the talk; any mistakes or misrepresentations are our fault, not the speaker's.

gocv.io

Ron Evans

  • Creator of gobot.io
  • New project: gocv.io OpenCV in Go!
  • CV == Computer Vision
  • Go -> CGO -> C -> C++
  • Linux, Darwin and Windows.
  • Live demo of face tracking.
  • Live demo of rotating through several video filters with the webcam facing the audience.

Using Go on Android and Python

Laurent Leveque

  • From Go to Android - gomobile bind
    • Major downside is it only supports one type byte[]
  • From Go to Python - go build buildmode=c-shared
  • Will have to write C code to manage memory. This is tricky and repetitive, so you can just write it once and use go to generate the glue code.
    • Annotate your API methods
    • Write your own code generator: go/parser and go/ast to naviage your Go code programmatically
    • Construct your output with text/template
    • Use //go:generate to trigger your code generator
  • You can easily combine this by serializing your inputs and outputs with Protobuf
    • No more limitation with Gomobile (only byte[])
    • Less C code (only one type to handle)
    • Protobuf is cross language.
    • You can also generate API stubs.
  • Protobuf:
    • protoc --go_out=plugins=myStubGenerator:$(pwd) *.proto
    • protoc-gen-go is written in Go and has a plugin system.
  • Conclusion:
    • Protobuf tools simplify cross-platform lib dev.
    • Go tools help to generate all the wrapping code.
    • This approach works with other languages (with C bindings)
  • Example by speaker goprotopy

Go in Data Science

Diana Ortega

  • Backend engineer working with data scientists
  • Deep learning project - A lot of data from different sources and different types -> magic -> graphs
  • Magic is dev and data scientists which massage and aggregate the data.
  • Normalize data - normally use a pipeline, for example pachyderm. pachyderm is written in go but is language agnostic since the pipelines run on k8s and docker.
  • notebook: gophernotes useful for testing hypothesis.
  • gonum: libraries for matrices and linear algebra, statistics, prob distributions, etc
  • For more information about go + datascience visit gopherdata.io.

Go for real time streaming architectures

Mickael Remond

  • What are straming archs? Use events rather than shared states.
  • Streaming arch is often represented as pipelines.
  • Also called reactive architectures
  • Microservices are often using streaming, since it can be used as a glue between independent services.
  • Central Realtime Engine, often Kafka
  • Processing Frameworks: Streaming engines spark streaming, flink, kafka streams, akka streams.
  • App --events-> Kafka --> Processing Framework
  • Cloud-native way:
    • Use go services using sarama, Sarama cluster, and protobuf. Also can use Nats instead of Kafka (written in Go).
    • Packaging you can use Docker/k8s. Then you can scale horizontally by just adjusting the replica count of a deployment.
  • Benefits
    • Simple/manageable code
    • Performance
    • Scalability
    • Workers themselves can also use Go concurrency for further performance

Rethinking errors in Go

Marcel van Lohuizen

func writeToGS(ctx context.Context, bucket, dst, src string) (err error) {
    client, err := storage.NewClient(ctx)
    if err != nil {
        return err
    }
    defer client.Close()
 
    w := client.Bucket(bucket).Object(dst).NewWriter(ctx)
    defer w.CloseWithError(err)
 
    _, err = io.Copy(w, r)
    return err
}

The above code handles some errors, but is not fully correct:

  • It needs to handle panics
  • It needs to return the error from Close

Putting it all together the code becomes very complicated:

func writeToGS(ctx context.Context, bucket, dst string, r io.Reader) (err error) {
    client, err := storage.NewClient(ctx)
    if err != nil {
        return err
    }
    defer client.Close()
 
    w := client.Bucket(bucket).Object(dst).NewWriter(ctx)
    err = errPanicking
    defer func() {
        if err != nil {
            _ = w.CloseWithError(err)
        } else {
            err = w.Close()
        }
    }
    _, err = io.Copy(w, r) {
    return err
}

How to simplify? Semantics first. An error is recoverable, a panic is not (sort of). Marcel created a burner package github.com/mpvl/errc which unifies error panic and defer. It funnel all errors, including panics, to a single error variable:

func writeToGS(ctx context.Context, bucket, dst, src string) (err error) {
    e := errc.Catch(&err)
    defer e.Handle()
 
    client, err := storage.NewClient(ctx)
    e.Must(err)
    e.Defer(client.Close, errc.Discard)
 
    w := client.Bucket(bucket).Object(dst).NewWriter(ctx)
    e.Defer(w.CloseWithError)
 
    _, err = io.Copy(w, r)
    e.Must(err)
}

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