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**Erik St. Martin:** Alright, so before we run out of show time here, let's chat with Travis here a bit. So Travis, you guys were one of the first - at least that I remember - to publicly state that you were using Go. Definitely long before many of the big guys started waving their hands with the "We are, too!" I think... |
**Travis Reeder:** Sure. The Go Tool did exist, I believe, when we launched, but it was pre-1.0. Our decision process was... Well, basically we were hitting a wall on Ruby, and we needed to change. I was a long-time Java programmer, so it was kind of that I really wanted to go back to Java to get more performance, or u... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Because you really liked tweaking the JVM, and you wanted to do it again. |
**Travis Reeder:** I love it, yeah. So we looked at these things, Scala was kind of popular at the time too, and Clojure was kind of hip, too. But this Go thing was there, and we saw that Google was back and there were some really smart people behind it. We tried it, and I think the simplicity of the language, with alm... |
We had some convincing to do, our team and our investors, because you never want to pick the wrong technology, and we just moved forward with it. It turns out it was a really good decision, luckily. |
**Erik St. Martin:** It's crazy, because I love the language and Brian and I bought into it pretty early on too, but I don't know whether we made any major production releases pre-1.0. Do you think, Brian? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I put R60 or R61 in production. That was definitely make-file days. |
**Erik St. Martin:** But it wasn't the core of the application |
**Brian Ketelsen:** No, it was one of the pieces of the constellation, out on the peripheral. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah. I mean, building an entire company betting on that this was going to explode is really crazy to think about. I'm glad all of us stuck with it; look at where Go is today. But you don't look at the growth pattern... Now you can kind of look at the growth pattern and see the adoption happening, ... |
**Travis Reeder:** I always ponder this, I always wonder... There are these early adopters like us and you guys - I'm not saying we did this, but I think us doing that and kind of saying how well it worked in production, and how it totally dominated our previous version that was written in Ruby... I think those kinds o... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I almost disagree just because in the early days for every Iron.io blog post about how you guys moved from slow things on lots of servers to really fast things on fewer servers, there were just as many "We tried Go, it ate our lunch and destroyed the entire company" blog posts. It seemed, especially... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think collectively, the passion that existed in community as it stood was so great though that if you dipped your toes in, you kind of got swallowed, you just got pulled into it. And I think that was some of the stuff -- we've talked about this before too, that I think the reason that we loved it... |
**Travis Reeder:** Yeah. Rob Pike spoke at one of our early meetups at Heroku's product three or four years ago, and he said surprisingly that most of the people that were using Go were from Ruby and Python and JavaScript. They were expecting people to switch from C and C++ to make their lives easier, but it turns out ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I don't think they predicted that at all. It definitely pulled a lot of people in. People who wanted to do systems programming that felt like maybe it was unapproachable because they've seen C, they've seen C++, they've seen maybe some assembly and it just seemed beyond their reach. Then ther... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I think there's a cognitive load, a cognitive overhead when you're working in something as deep as C++. When you've got templates and all of that code, it's difficult to be really productive. On the other hand, if you're doing the same thing over and over, you reuse a lot of your code, so sure you c... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I feel that with Go as well the syntax is so concise and small. I feel like I'm using the same thing over and over again, which at some point I'm just thinking about the problem ahead of me, as opposed to "How do I do this?" or "How do I do that?" It's completely different. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah, Go is a small language. How many keywords - 67 keywords, something like that? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Isn't it 25? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** And two of them are crazy keywords, like 'whereas' that we put in just for fun. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[laughs\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** Just for fun... |
**Travis Reeder:** \[laughs\] I really like that you don't need code generation. Coming from Java, you had to use a big IDE that could do a bunch of refactoring and generate all your getters and setters and all this code, whereas with Go you don't really need any of that stuff. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah, a simple text editor. It makes your life easy in Go, I agree. You can keep that whole code model in your head. |
**Erik St. Martin:** It's crazy, because Vim - I live by Vim, and Java is the only language I will not try to do... \[laughter\] That's the only one... I'm like, "Alright, alright... I'll just install the IDE", because it feels that painful. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** So Travis, what kind of pain points did you hit early on with Go? Did you run into big garbage collection pauses, did you see anything crazy like that, that you ended up having to diagnose early? Or was it relatively painless for you? |
**Travis Reeder:** This was a while back, but I think the benefits we gained were so significant that we probably overlooked a lot of the drawbacks. I think probably it was mostly the amount of libraries that were available at that time, which weren't that many. And there weren't that many that were well-tested and thi... |
**Erik St. Martin:** It was maybe a week or so ago Brian and I were reminiscing on that, too. Not in a good way, but thinking back and comparing to today, how much easier people have it. Because you had to write libraries for everything back then. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** When I was a kid... \[laughter\] We didn't have DB SQL. The first Go app we put into production, DB SQL didn't exist. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Crazy. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, and some of this stuff too... We constantly see stuff now - one of the ones I saw earlier today was OCR written in Go. You can find projects for everything now. |
**Travis Reeder:** That's nice. And really high quality. The libraries that come out of the Go community, a lot of them are really exceptional. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah, they're strong, I agree. Go seems to attract really bright people that have solid engineering minds, and then me. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I think Go also benefits from the wave of test-driven development that the Ruby developers went through - that's what I'm familiar with. Before I found Ruby, I wasn't doing that, I didn't even really understand how to do it. And now these developers are working with Go and they bring all those go... |
**Travis Reeder:** Yeah, that's a good point. I'd add to that too that it seems like most Go libraries people are testing for performance, too. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, and if they aren't, somebody else is. There's somebody who just crawls... Brian downloads the cool projects, somebody else goes and finds the cool projects and submits PRs to reduce allocations. |
**Travis Reeder:** Yeah, it's amazing. Which in Ruby you never saw. They'd be well-tested, but the performance, I don't think it was even looked at. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Nobody cared. |
**Travis Reeder:** Yeah. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Maybe it was just like the "Why bother?" mentality, or I don't know. I'm a little disconnected from that world now, but it seems like a lot of Ruby itself and a lot of the Rails libraries, people have been going on these crazy endeavors to reduce allocations and things like that there, too. So mayb... |
**Travis Reeder:** Yeah. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I think it's part of the Go mindset. |
**Travis Reeder:** Yeah. I was just gonna say that. I think people choose Go because -- well, a lot of it is because of performance, so I think the libraries have to kind of follow suit. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, that's true, too. If you're going to choose it for performance, you might wanna actually pay attention to the fact of whether or not you're doing it in a performant manner. |
**Travis Reeder:** Yeah. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** That reminds me of my first attempt to make an addition to the Go language, to fix a bug in Go proper. I think it was in encoding somewhere, like maybe base64 encoding. I solved the problem, fixed the bug, wrote a test, all of that, and I submitted the CL, and I got back a comment immediately, "This... |
**Erik St. Martin:** It's funny though, because I look at code and I see some of the allocations that are obvious, but other people, they just totally outshine you. They look at something really quick and they're like, "There's five allocations there." You're like, "What?" How did you know that just by looking at it fo... |
**Travis Reeder:** I think on the core team it's almost like a game inside the team... I remember Blake Mizerany - I don't think he's on the core team, but he's very close with Brad Fitzpatrick and those guys... I think they almost have competitions; I think he wrote a log parser, to parse log font, and his whole goal ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** That's awesome. |
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