Bookmarks (217)

Boxes and Glue: A Typesetting Library — What a charming name. This is a PDF typesetting library using “the spirit of TeX’s algorithms” to lay out elements onto the page. This tweet gives an idea of how rendered text looks. (Note the AGPLv3 license.)

go-nanoid: An Fast and Efficient Unique ID Generator — Note that this does not generate UUIDs, but it generates URL friendly IDs from a larger character set which makes them shorter. ksuid may be of interest to you if you’d prefer something sortable.

Creating a Custom GitHub Action with Go — If you want to go even smaller with your Docker image, though, consider using multi stage builds with distroless, as labeler-action does.

A Limitation on What go install Can Install (as of Go 1.18) — “For now, if you’re developing a Go program and you need to use replace directives in your go.mod during development, you’ll have to do some extra work.”

Notes from a Go 1.17 to 1.18 Upgrade — The folks at Brev were itching to upgrade to Go 1.18 to get their hands on generics and this post touches on a few things they encountered.

▶  How to Write a Fuzz Test — Last week we featured Saba’s video about what fuzz testing is but now she’s back with a 6 minute narrated demo, including how to look at failures and rerun them specifically.

Awesome Go: Almost 2400 Categorized Go Resources — Every year we link to this fantastic resource because unlike many ‘awesome’ lists, it continues to get very frequent updates and you’re encouraged to submit contributions of your own too (but don't forget to send them to us too! 😉)

Sliding Window Sampling for go-metrics — Usually with go-metrics, old data is only expired as new data comes in but on low-volume metrics this can cause misleading results through the use of stale data. The sliding window approach implemented here helps to resolve that.

Gopherlings: Learn Go by Fixing Tiny Incorrect Programs — 18 very simple programs to fix, but it’s an interesting format and would be fun to see at a larger scale or for specific niches?

Cobra 1.5.0: A 'Commander' for Modern Go CLI Interactions — A popular toolset for creating flexible Go-based CLI apps. v1.5 introduces the ability to mark flags/options are required or exclusive as a group (e.g. needing --username and --password to both be present).

A wolfSSL Wrapper for Lightweight SSL/TLS in Go — wolfSSL is a lightweight, portable SSL/TLS library targeting IoT and embedded environments. The repo includes examples of creating a server or client with it.

▶  An Introduction to Fuzzing in Go — An official, three-minute, introductory video from Google on getting started with Go’s newest fuzz testing features (or, if you prefer, a written tutorial). Elsewhere, Khaled Yakdan writes about improvements being made to fuzzing for Go 1.19 – a lot of work has gone into this.

Render 1.5: Easily Render JSON, XML, Binary Data, and HTML Template Responses — A package for rendering various types of output in a more structured way if you’re putting together a Go-powered HTTP service, say.

Viddy: A Modern Go Alternative to watch — It’s not every day we see a Clockwork Orange themed project. The idea here is viddy can execute commands on a periodic basis but you get niceties like ‘time travel’, attractive output, and paging.

A Faster Development Experience with Vite, Hugo and Preact — Hugo is a fantastic Go-powered static site generator but sometimes you might need to wander onto the JavaScript path a little.. Dawid found Vite to help a lot with getting everything 🎵 working together.

How to Build Your Package Docs Locally — It started with an aim: “I wanted to see a rendering of my module docs as they would on pkg.go.dev locally before publishing” – and since godoc is deprecated, Milan figured out how to do it with pkgsite.

Making Code Faster — When someone with Tim’s experience talks about improving code performance, it never makes for a bad read. Here he shares a story of profiling some Go code. His approach is simple: Test, Benchmark, Refactor, Iterate.

How Uber Halved Its Go Monorepo CI Build Time — Uber rocks a monorepo setup for its Go-based back-end services and libraries and a downside was a cascade of checks and complexity when making changes to widely used dependencies within the monorepo. This post digs into the problem and how Uber works around it (to some extent, anyway).

'Don't Put All Your Code in Internal'? — An unsurprisingly controversial self-proclaimed rant about the use of ‘internal’ packages to hide implementation details from end users. Food for thought, even if you disagree.

Go 1.19 Beta 1 Released — This post on the golang-announce group just has the basics of how to download it, but these draft release notes go further into actual features (which are predominantly fixes and tweaks - don’t expect a big 1.18 style release, though the addition of an optional soft memory limit for the runtime is interesting).

Language Proposal: Bring Direct SIMD Support into Go — Language proposals are always interesting to read, particularly when they provoke discussion; here, a simd library to take advantage of SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) CPU instructions is proposed and has been marked “active” by the core team for now.

Go’s New Sorting Algorithm: pdqsort — We first linked to news about this back in issue 408 but here’s a reminder and look at what the source says about it. “Never (significantly) slower, often faster” sounds like a win. Academic paper (PDF) explaining the algorithm.

How Static Code Analysis Prevents You From Waking Up at 3AM with Production on Fire — An extensive and well transcribed presentation (with a video version available, too) that discusses the pros of static analysis along with several examples of using go vet and staticcheck effectively.

How to Deploy a Go Webapp with Docker — A comprehensive look at building a Go web application with Docker, including development environment, production considerations, and building with CI.

Adventures in AWS Lambda Land: A Migration Gone Well — Lessons learned moving from long-running processes hosted in containers (ECS) to a serverless-based approach, including some annoying-but-still-better-anyway gotchas.

▶  Creating Basic Game Animations with Go and Raylib — Raylib is a cross platform 2D drawing/gamedev library that has Go bindings.

Chroma 2.2: A Pure Go General Purpose Syntax Highlighter — Take source code and turn it into syntax highlighted HTML, ANSI colored text, or just grab the raw tokens in JSON. Brings most of the features of Pygments to Go and can use Pygments’ lexers and styles too. There’s an online playground where you can try it out too.

Trie: Trie Implementation Targeting Auto-Completion Use Cases — An interesting aspect to this project is there’s a WebAssembly-powered online demo. Certainly feels fast in the browser.

Validate: A Generic Data Validation and Filtering Library — Lots of examples in the README. Validate maps, structs, HTTP requests, add custom error messages, and has about 70 built-in validators.

Rope: A Persistent Rope Data Structure — Very new and no docs, so you’ll want to check the tests for examples. A “rope” is basically a binary tree of strings.

Data Race Patterns in Go — Uber's engineers analyzed over 1,100 data races and found that it’s much easier than you might think to introduce them in Go "due to certain language design choices." This post breaks down seven of the most common reasons – your code probably engages in one of them too.

garr: High Performance, Thread-Safe, Lock-Free Data Mechanisms — Currently includes a circuit breaker, adder, queue, retry/backoff, and worker pool.

DurationLint: Linter to Disallow Use of Untyped Literals and Constants as time.Duration — A very specific pain point.

gta: Find Which Go Packages Have Deviated from Upstream — Does transitive analysis to find packages whose dependencies have changed.

Ddosify 0.8: High-Performance HTTP Load Testing Tool — Supports both HTTP and HTTP/2. Be sure to use this with permission and for good.

Benthos 4.2: A Stream Processor for 'Mundane Tasks' — It’s been nearly a year since we mentioned Benthos but it’s been coming along so well recently. Define pipelines to connect together various sources and sinks (e.g. S3, Elasticsearch, files, Redis, etc.) and perform operations on the payloads.

Mo: Monads and Popular FP Abstractions for Go 1.18+ — One for the functional programming fans with a fistful of monads (including family favorites like Option (Maybe), Result and Either) and powered by generics.

GoPlus (Go+) 1.1: A More Script-y Variant of Go — A confusingly named but well intentioned Go variant, of sorts, that leans more towards Python-style simplicity for scripting, educational, and data science use cases. v1.1 brings in a lot more module support. There’s a little demo on their home page.

Using Go's Standard Library Interfaces — A more introductory item. Nice to see more people going back to cementing knowledge through blogging.

Performance of Coroutine-Style Lexers in Go — Spoiler alert: They’re fast. But, does speed really matter for a lexer? Well, if you’re interested enough to read this article, then you probably already know that answer.

(Mostly) Automatic Go Dependency Updates with GitHub Actions — When there’s no defined process ensuring dependencies get updated, well.. you’re going to end up with some outdated packages in your stack. This isn’t a hard task, really, but one that people don’t always think about.

Generating a Random float64 with crypto/rand — crypto/rand is more cryptographically secure than math/rand but offers fewer options (which you can work around, as seen here).

How to Embed a React App in a Go Binary — While you can use Go to write a backend API, you might use something like React on the front end. Given Go’s power in producing single distributable binaries, could you put your front end code into the binary too? Sure.

Fyne 2.2: Cross Platform GUI Toolkit for Go — Fyne is a continually improving option for building both desktop and mobile UIs with Go and now includes extra controls like a rich text widget, system tray support, JSON theming, and more. Is there a tutorial? Yes there is.

▶  Why a Dev Built a Faster rsync from Scratch in Go — A look at one developer’s story (oriented around a 50-minute talk) about reimplementing a common file transfer tool in Go. Less about Go, per se, and more about the problem at hand, networking, and gokrazy.

Ebiten, the 2D Game Library for Go, Becomes Ebitengine™ — If you want to create a 2D game in Go, whether for desktop, mobile, or even the Nintendo Switch, this remains a great place to start, and now it’s got a new name too (in order to land a trademark in Japan, I'm told). There’s also an Ebitengine Game Jam starting next week, if...

TestFixtures 3.7: Ruby on Rails-Like Test Fixtures for Go — A mature library that takes the opinion that writing tests against a real database is the best approach and provides a way to define predictable fixtures to make this easier.

Bluemonday: A Fast Go HTML Sanitizer — Takes untrusted user generated content as an input and returns HTML sanitized against an allowlist of approved elements and attributes.