[erlang-questions] (Googl never Erlanged) Rewriting a large production system in Go (matt-welsh.blogspot.com)

Wed Aug 21 04:27:22 CEST 2013

except perhaps reading people complaining about it.
or people responding to such complaints.

On 08/20/2013 03:26 AM, Loïc Hoguin wrote:
> Why do you paste us HN discussions? There's no better waste of time 
> than to read programmers comparing "sizes".
>
> On 08/20/2013 07:02 AM, giovanni_re wrote:
>> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6234736
>> Rewriting a large production system in Go (matt-welsh.blogspot.com)
>> 222 points by qdie 1 day ago | 173 comments
>> http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2013/08/rewriting-large-production-system-in-go.html 
>>
>>
>> MW: PhD U. Cali Forni Berkeley
>>
>>
>>
>> ==========  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6234736
>> derefr 1 day ago | link You know, every time I see some Googler shocked
>> at the effectiveness and various advantages of coding in Go, I wonder
>> why Google never adopted Erlang. They could have been getting all these
>> same advantages (and then some) a decade ago :)
>>
>> reply
>>
>> [GR:  Would Googl use an Erlang on its' search engine show?]
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> zaphar 1 day ago | link (full disclosure: I work at google and also like
>> erlang) Erlang has fantastic facilities for robustness and concurrency.
>> What it does not have is type safety and it's terrible at handling text
>> in a performant fashion. So if you don't care about either of those
>> things and only care about robustness and concurrency then Erlang is
>> great. There were internal discussions about Erlang here but the upshot
>> was. We had already basically duplicated Erlangs supervision model in
>> our infrastructure, only we did it for all languages and Erlang didn't
>> offer any benefits in performance for us. It's only benefit would have
>> been the concurrency model. That's much less benefit than Go gives. Go
>> gives you Erlangs concurency model, a similar philosophy of robustness,
>> type safety, all batteries included, and performance. Equating the two
>> languages works in 1 or 2 dimensions but not on all the dimensions
>> google cares about.
>>
>> reply
>>
>> derefr 1 day ago | link Interesting, thanks for that; it's pretty much
>> what I guessed (especially the bit about the supervision tree and
>> hot-code-upgrade advantages being mooted by your infrastructure.) On a
>> tangent, though: > What it does not have is type safety I've tried to
>> work this out before (I'm designing a new language for Erlang's VM), but
>> as far as I can tell, type safety is in practice incompatible with
>> VM-supported hot code upgrade. If you have two services, A and B, and
>> you need to upgrade them both, but you can't "stop the world" to do an
>> atomic upgrade of both A and B together (because you're running a
>> distributed soft real-time system, after all), then you need to switch
>> out A, and then switch out B. So, at some point, on some nodes, A will
>> be running a version with an ABI incompatible with B. In a
>> strongly-typed system, the VM wouldn't allow A's new code to load, since
>> it refers to functions in B with type signatures that don't exist. On
>> the other hand, in a system with pattern-matching and a "let it crash"
>> philosophy, you just let A's new code start up and repeatedly
>> try-and-fail to communicate with B for a while, until B's code gets
>> upgraded as well--and now the types are compatible again. It's an
>> interesting problem.
>>
>> reply
>>
>> laureny 1 day ago | link > type safety is in practice incompatible with
>> VM-supported hot code upgrade. That's not true. First, it's very easy to
>> hot reload changes that have been made to the code that are backward
>> compatible. The JVM spec describes in very specific details what that
>> means (adding or removing a method is not backward compatible, modifying
>> a body is, etc...). This is how Hotswap works, the JVM has been using it
>> for years. As for changes that are backward incompatible, you can still
>> manage them with application level techniques, such as rolling out
>> servers or simply allow two different versions of the class to exist at
>> the same time (JRebel does that, as do other a few other products in the
>> JVM ecosystem). Erlang doesn't really have any advantages over
>> statically typed systems in the hot reload area, and its lack of static
>> typing is a deal breaker for pretty much any serious production
>> deployment.
>>
>> reply
>>
>> rdtsc 20 hours ago | link > lack of static typing is a deal breaker for
>> pretty much any serious production deployment. Are you talking about
>> Google only where they made it a mandate or in general? There are
>> serious production deployments on Python, Ruby, Erlang and Javascript. I
>> will trade expressiveness and less lines of code with a strong but
>> dynamically typed language + tests over more a static typed language
>> with more lines of code all being equal. Or put it another way, if
>> strong typing is the main thing that protects against lack of faults and
>> crashes in production, there is a serious issue that needs to be
>> addressed (just my 2 cents).
>>
>> reply
>>
>> derefr 23 hours ago | link > As for changes that are backward
>> incompatible, you can still manage them with application level
>> techniques, such as rolling out servers or simply allow two different
>> versions of the class to exist at the same time (JRebel does that, as do
>> other a few other products in the JVM ecosystem). Neither of these allow
>> for the whole reason Erlang has hot code upgrade in the first place:
>> allowing to upgrade the code on one side of a TCP connection without
>> dropping the connection to the other side. Tell me how to do that with a
>> static type system :)
>>
>> reply
>>
>> pmahoney 10 hours ago | link Tomcat (and other app servers) has support
>> for doing hot reloads of Java web apps while not reloading the HTTP
>> layer (and not dropping TCP connections).
>> http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/06/zero-downtime-deploymen... I have
>> implemented a similar system for JRuby apps running inside a Servlet
>> container. There are many caveats. I don't actually recommend it because
>> for a while you're using nearly twice the memory (and JRuby is
>> particularly memory hungry). Also there are many ways to leak the old
>> class definitions such that they are not GC'd (e.g. thread locals). But
>> it's certainly possible. I suspect that Erlang, Java, and all languages
>> are in the same boat: some parts can be upgraded live in the VM while
>> other parts require a full restart (maybe coordinating with multiple
>> nodes and a load balancer to achieve zero-downtime).
>>
>> reply
>>
>> lenkite 10 hours ago | link Out of curiosity, where/why would such an
>> exotic feature be needed in today's internet architectures where you
>> always front a group of servers with a load balancer ?
>>
>> reply
>>
>> butterflyhug 5 hours ago | link Not all Internet protocols are HTTP. If
>> you're running a service where long-lived connections are the norm,
>> "simply fronting a bunch of servers with a load balancer" can require a
>> pretty smart load balancer. E.g. IMAP connections often last hours or
>> even days, and are required to maintain a degree of statefulness.
>>
>> reply
>>
>> DanWaterworth 1 day ago | link Go gives you Erlangs concurency model
>> There are a number of significant differences between Erlang's and Go's
>> concurrency models: Asynchronous vs synchronous communication,
>> per-thread vs per-process heaps, send to process vs send to channel.
>>
>> reply
>>
>> dbaupp 1 day ago | link Go doesn't have strong type safety either; I
>> remember a recent story about a Go stdlib function "accidentally"
>> calling an interface it shouldn't.
>>
>> reply
>>
>> f2f 22 hours ago | link it wasn't accidental -- it was written on
>> purpose by a programmer (a conversion from Writer to WriteCloser). it
>> was immediately acknowledged as an error and eventually may be caught by
>> the standard code examining tool "vet".
>>
>> reply
>>
>> pcwalton 22 hours ago | link What would the static analysis that "vet"
>> is performing enforce to stop this? No interface-to-interface downcasts?
>>
>> reply
>>
>> .....
>> [It goes on, & on, & on & on,
>> when Go & Erlang party together.]
>>
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