Golang has an excellent net stack, but not perfect. In particular, it appears to suffer from the ever-recurring issue of not paying enough attention to teardown. Everything must return to 0, ideally gracefully, but even the best programmers like to gloss over the details, because it’s easier to just kill everything and call it a day.

Tcp is full duplex, but net.Conn (the main std API that everyone is using), doesn’t have a “CloseWrite” method. That bubbles down to all downstream uses, such as tls. Another example would be how deadlines and timeouts are handled, and how they (don’t) interact with context, which is the blessed way to do timeouts for all non-IO purposes..

Still, Go is one of the best languages for network programming imo, because it allows you to check most edge cases (like timeouts) without wasting like 4 threads to do so.

But that’s just like.. my opinion.

Relevant to the Race condition on error from (*Rows).Close. The Tour of Go notes, "The deferred call’s arguments are evaluated immediately, but the function call is not executed until the surrounding function returns." Problems with deferring Close() on writable files have been known for some time, and the recommendation I have is not to defer just the close, but defer a function or block that does the close and handles any error return. In this case, though, the dangling buffers in the driver introduce a problem that goes beyond just handling an error on close.

> Although GitHub.com is still a Rails monolith, over the past few years we’ve begun the process of extracting critical functionality from our main application, by rewriting some of the code in Go—mostly addressing the pieces that need to run faster and more reliably than what we can accomplish with Ruby

Is there anything GitHub haven't copied from GitLab? They did it before it was cool multiple years ago. Same with CI/CD, Kanban project management, package management, etc.

Competition is good for users, but it must be annoying for GitLab to get copied in everything by the incumbent competitor that remained stale for years before being bought by unlimited money Microsoft.

On this topic, maybe finally this will make GitHub Enterprise self-hosted an acceptable alternative to GitLab? As far as i know it has always been extremely painful to manage.

A lot of people believes rewriting in a different language will solve most the bugs. In reality this never happens to me in real life, not even once, on the other hand people just repeat the old bugs in a different way and feel they are doing a good job fixing them.

Discussed at the time:

Three bugs in the Go MySQL driver - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23254045 - May 2020 (87 comments)

I used to have a ton of issues with the Go MySQL driver - there was a specific version with specific settings I'd cargo-cult into all my projects along with comments explaining not to mess with them because I knew it was relatively stable.

These days though it's genuinely pretty solid, haven't had a problem in a couple years. They've largely worked the kinks out.

Someone should add (2020) to title and it was pretty old one.

Different programming languages, same databases, same problems