36 items tagged “go”
The Go programming language.
2024
Everything I’ve learned so far about running local LLMs (via) Chris Wellons shares detailed notes on his experience running local LLMs on Windows - though most of these tips apply to other operating systems as well.
This is great, there's a ton of detail here and the root recommendations are very solid: Use llama-server from llama.cpp and try ~8B models first (Chris likes Llama 3.1 8B Instruct at Q4_K_M as a first model), anything over 10B probably won't run well on a CPU so you'll need to consider your available GPU VRAM.
This is neat:
Just for fun, I ported llama.cpp to Windows XP and ran a 360M model on a 2008-era laptop. It was magical to load that old laptop with technology that, at the time it was new, would have been worth billions of dollars.
I need to spend more time with Chris's favourite models, Mistral-Nemo-2407 (12B) and Qwen2.5-14B/72B.
Chris also built illume, a Go CLI tool for interacting with models that looks similar to my own LLM project.
Some Go web dev notes. Julia Evans on writing small, self-contained web applications in Go:
In general everything about it feels like it makes projects easy to work on for 5 days, abandon for 2 years, and then get back into writing code without a lot of problems.
Go 1.22 introduced HTTP routing in February of this year, making it even more practical to build a web application using just the Go standard library.
Notes on running Go in the browser with WebAssembly (via) Neat, concise tutorial by Eli Bendersky on compiling Go applications that can then be loaded into a browser using WebAssembly and integrated with JavaScript. Go functions can be exported to JavaScript like this:
js.Global().Set("calcHarmonic", jsCalcHarmonic)
And Go code can even access the DOM using a pattern like this:
doc := js.Global().Get("document")
inputElement := doc.Call("getElementById", "timeInput")
input := inputElement.Get("value")
Bundling the WASM Go runtime involves a 2.5MB file load, but there’s also a TinyGo alternative which reduces that size to a fourth.
Migrating Mess With DNS to use PowerDNS (via) Fascinating in-depth write-up from Julia Evans about how she upgraded her "mess with dns" playground application to use PowerDNS, an open source DNS server with a comprehensive JSON API.
If you haven't explored mess with dns it's absolutely worth checking out. No login required: when you visit the site it assigns you a random subdomain (I got garlic299.messwithdns.com just now) and then lets you start adding additional sub-subdomains with their own DNS records - A records, CNAME records and more.
The interface then shows a live (WebSocket-powered) log of incoming DNS requests and responses, providing instant feedback on how your configuration affects DNS resolution.
High-precision date/time in SQLite
(via)
Another neat SQLite extension from Anton Zhiyanov. sqlean-time (C source code here) implements high-precision time and date functions for SQLite, modeled after the design used by Go.
A time is stored as a 64 bit signed integer seconds 0001-01-01 00:00:00 UTC - signed so you can represent dates in the past using a negative number - plus a 32 bit integer of nanoseconds - combined into a a 13 byte internal representation that can be stored in a BLOB column.
A duration uses a 64-bit number of nanoseconds, representing values up to roughly 290 years.
Anton includes dozens of functions for parsing, displaying, truncating, extracting fields and converting to and from Unix timestamps.
My architecture is a monolith written in Go (this is intentional, I sacrificed scalability to improve my shipping speed), and this is where SQLite shines. With a DB located on the local NVMe disk, a 5$ VPS can deliver a whopping 60K reads and 20K writes per second.
Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open source maintenance firm (via) Filippo Valsorda has been working as a full-time professional open source maintainer for nearly two years now, accepting payments on retainer from companies that depend on his cryptography Go packages.
This has worked well enough that he's now expanding: Geomys (a genus of gophers) is a new company which adds two new "associate maintainers" and an administrative director, covering more projects and providing clients with access to more expertise.
Filipino describes the model like this:
If you’re betting your business on a critical open source technology, you
- want it to be sustainably and predictably maintained; and
- need occasional access to expertise that would be blisteringly expensive to acquire and retain.
Getting maintainers on retainer solves both problems for a fraction of the cost of a fully-loaded full-time engineer. From the maintainers’ point of view, it’s steady income to keep doing what they do best, and to join one more Slack Connect channel to answer high-leverage questions. It’s a great deal for both sides.
For more on this model, watch Filippo's FOSDEM talk from earlier this year.
Optimizing Large-Scale OpenStreetMap Data with SQLite (via) JT Archie describes his project to take 9GB of compressed OpenStreetMap protobufs data for the whole of the United States and load it into a queryable SQLite database.
OSM tags are key/value pairs. The trick used here for FTS-accelerated tag queries is really neat: build a SQLite FTS table containing the key/value pairs as space concatenated text, then run queries that look like this:
SELECT
id
FROM
entries e
JOIN search s ON s.rowid = e.id
WHERE
-- use FTS index to find subset of possible results
search MATCH 'amenity cafe'
-- use the subset to find exact matches
AND tags->>'amenity' = 'cafe';
JT ended up building a custom SQLite Go extension, SQLiteZSTD, to further accelerate things by supporting queries against read-only zstd compresses SQLite files. Apparently zstd has a feature that allows "compressed data to be stored so that subranges of the data can be efficiently decompressed without requiring the entire document to be decompressed", which works well with SQLite's page format.
Serving a billion web requests with boring code (via) Bill Mill provides a deep retrospective from his work helping build a relaunch of the medicare.gov/plan-compare site.
It's a fascinating case study of the choose boring technology mantra put into action. The "boring" choices here were PostgreSQL, Go and React, all three of which are so widely used and understood at this point that you're very unlikely to stumble into surprises with them.
Key goals for the site were accessibility, in terms of users, devices and performance. Despite best efforts:
The result fell prey after a few years to a common failure mode of react apps, and became quite heavy and loaded somewhat slowly.
I've seen this pattern myself many times over, and I'd love to understand why. React itself isn't a particularly large dependency but somehow it always seems to lead to architectural bloat over time. Maybe that's more of an SPA thing than something that's specific to React.
Loads of other interesting details in here. The ETL details - where brand new read-only RDS databases were spun up every morning after a four hour build process - are particularly notable.
Most people think that we format Go code with
gofmtto make code look nicer or to end debates among team members about program layout. But the most important reason for gofmt is that if an algorithm defines how Go source code is formatted, then programs, likegoimportsorgorenameorgo fix, can edit the source code more easily, without introducing spurious formatting changes when writing the code back. This helps you maintain code over time.
— Russ Cox
redka (via) Anton Zhiyanov’s new project to build a subset of Redis (including protocol support) using Go and SQLite. Also works as a Go library.
The guts of the SQL implementation are in the internal/sqlx folder.
The One Billion Row Challenge in Go: from 1m45s to 4s in nine solutions (via) How fast can you read a billion semicolon delimited (name;float) lines and output a min/max/mean summary for each distinct name—13GB total?
Ben Hoyt describes his 9 incrementally improved versions written in Go in detail. The key optimizations involved custom hashmaps, optimized line parsing and splitting the work across multiple CPU cores.
How I write HTTP services in Go after 13 years (via) Useful set of current best practices for deploying HTTP servers written in Go. I guess Go counts as boring technology these days, which is high praise in my book.
2023
How ima.ge.cx works (via) ima.ge.cx is Aidan Steele’s web tool for browsing the contents of Docker images hosted on Docker Hub. The architecture is really interesting: it’s a set of AWS Lambda functions, written in Go, that fetch metadata about the images using Step Functions and then cache it in DynamoDB and S3. It uses S3 Select to serve directory listings from newline-delimited JSON in S3 without retrieving the whole file.
The WebAssembly Go Playground (via) Jeff Lindsay has a full Go 1.21.1 compiler running entirely in the browser.
Real Multithreading is Coming to Python—Learn How You Can Use It Now (via) Martin Heinz provides a detailed tutorial on trying out the new Per-Interpreter GIL feature that’s landing in Python 3.12, which allows Python code to run concurrently in multiple threads by spawning separate sub-interpreters, each with their own dedicated GIL.
It’s not an easy feature to play with yet! First you need to compile Python yourself, and then use APIs that are generally only available to C code (but should hopefully become available to Python code itself in Python 3.13).
Martin’s workaround for this is ingenious: it turns out the Python test.support package provides utility functions to help write tests against interpreters, and Martin shows how to abuse this module to launch, run and cleanup interpreters using regular Python code.
He also demonstrates test.support.interpreters.create_channel(), which can be used to create channels with receiver and sender ends, somewhat similar to Go.
Trainbot (via) “Trainbot watches a piece of train track, detects passing trains, and stitches together images of them”—check out the site itself too, which shows beautifully stitched panoramas of trains that have recently passed near Jo M’s apartment. Found via the best Hacker News thread I’ve seen in years, “Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?”.
I’m Now a Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer. Filippo Valsorda, previously a member of the Go team at Google, is now independent and making a full-time living as a maintainer of various open source projects relating to Go. He’s managing to pull in an amount “equivalent to my Google total compensation package”, which is a huge achievement: the greatest cost involved in independent open source is usually the opportunity cost of turning down a big tech salary. He’s doing this through a high touch retainer model, where six client companies pay him to keep working on his projects and also provide them with varying amounts of expert consulting.
2022
dolthub/jsplit (via) Neat Go CLI tool for working with truly gigantic JSON files. This assumes files will be an object with one or more keys that are themselves huge lists of objects—it than extracts those lists out into one or more newline-delimited JSON files (capping their size at 4GB) which are much easier to work with as streams of data.
Introducing sqlite-html: query, parse, and generate HTML in SQLite (via) Another brilliant SQLite extension module from Alex Garcia, this time written in Go. sqlite-html adds a whole family of functions to SQLite for parsing and constructing HTML strings, built on the Go goquery and cascadia libraries. Once again, Alex uses an Observable notebook to describe the new features, with embedded interactive examples that are backed by a Datasette instance running in Fly.
Making Code Faster. Tim Bray’s detailed guide to using the Go profiler.
Learn Go with tests. I really like this approach to learning a new language: start by learning to write tests (which gets you through hello world, environment setup and test running right from the beginning) and use them to explore the language. I also really like how modern Go development no longer depends on the GOPATH, which I always found really confusing.
A CGo-free port of SQLite. Fascinating Go version of SQLite, which uses Go code that has been translated from the original SQLite C using ccgo, a package by the same author which “translates cc ASTs to Go source code”. It claims to pass the full public SQLite test suite, which is very impressive.
Abusing AWS Lambda to make an Aussie Search Engine (via) Ben Boyter built a search engine that only indexes .au Australian websites, with the novel approach of directly compiling the search index into 250 different ~40MB large lambda functions written in Go, then running searches across 12 million pages by farming them out to all of the lambdas and combining the results. His write-up includes all sorts of details about how he built this, including how he ran the indexer and how he solved the surprisingly hard problem of returning good-enough text snippets for the results.
2021
lex.go in json5-go. This archived GitHub repository has a beautifully clean and clear example of a hand-written lexer in Go, for the JSON5 format (JSON + comments + multi-line strings). parser.go is worth a look too.
2020
I used to tolerate and expect complexity. Working on Go the past 10 years has changed my perspective, though. I now value simplicity above almost all else and tolerate complexity only when it's well isolated, well documented, well tested, and necessary to make things simpler overall at other layers for most people.
2019
gls: Goroutine local storage (via) Go doesn’t provide a mechanism for having “goroutine local” variables (like threadlocals in Python but for goroutines), and the structure of the language makes it really hard to get something working. JT Olio figured out a truly legendary hack: Go’s introspection lets you see the current stack, so he figured out a way to encode a base-16 identifer tag into the call order of 16 special nested functions. I particularly like the “What are people saying?” section of the README: “Wow, that’s horrifying.”—“This is the most terrible thing I have seen in a very long time.”—“Where is it getting a context from? Is this serializing all the requests? What the heck is the client being bound to? What are these tags? Why does he need callers? Oh god no. No no no.”
websocketd (via) Delightfully clever piece of design: “It’s like CGI, twenty years later, for WebSockets”. Simply run “websocketd --port=8080 my-program” and it will start up a WebSocket server on port 8080 and fire up a new process running your script every time it sees a new WebSocket connection. Standard in and standard out are automatically hooked up to the socket connection. Since it spawns a new process per connection this won’t work well with thousands of connections but for smaller scale projects it’s an excellent addition to the toolbok—and since it’s written in Go there are pre-compiled binaries available for almost everything.
2018
mkcert (via) Handy new tool from Filippo Valsorda (a cryptographer at Google) for easily generating TLS certificates for your local development environment. You can use this to get a certificate pair for a localhost web server created with a couple of simple commands.
2017
Running a load testing Go utility using Docker for Mac
I’m playing around with Zeit Now at the moment (see my previous entry) and decided to hit it with some traffic using Apache Bench. I got this SSL handshake error:
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