Half a million lines of Go

Back in December 2019, I first wrote about Goliath, Khan Academy’s project to migrate our backend from a Python 2 monolith to services written in Go, along with other changes needed to make that journey. I also wrote about how we’re making this change as incrementally as can be.

When we started Goliath, no one on the team knew Go beyond the experiments we ran to validate that Go would be a better choice for us than our other options. Today, all of our backend and full-stack engineers write Go, and our incremental delivery of Goliath has vaulted us over a big milestone: More than 500,000 lines of Go now running in production. This seemed like a good point to reflect on Go itself.

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Though we’re doing a straight port from largely single-threaded Python, we do make some uses of Go’s concurrency features already. One engineer noted that though channels were a much-highlighted feature of Go, we’ve used the features of the sync package far more than channels. It will be interesting to see if our preferences change over time.

I keep hearing this about people using go, they aren’t using channels, it may be because it’s just not interesting to them because they don’t need the concurrency it supplies compared to other operations, or because they are wanting parallel work for efficiency and channels then add too much overhead or unsafety. This is definitely one big thing I like about Rust, Fearless Concurrency is a memeword in that ecosystem for a reason.

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