An often overlooked part of the Rust license is that within a year of usage, users are required to make a comparison to their (previously) favorite language. While I am a bit late, I am ready to pay my dues. Given the overabundance of Rust vs X content, I'll try to cover only areas that haven't been discussed to death. Lifetimes and Borrows Did I say I wouldn't cover areas everyone has already talked about? I lied! ...
Go 1.24 introduces new support for "Tools", which allows easy consumption of tools (which are written in Go) as a dependency for a project. This could be anything from golangci-lint to protoc-gen-go. In this post, I will cover usage and limitations. Basic usage Adding a tool to a project is nearly the same as a standard runtime dependency, with the additional -tool flag: $ goimports # I don't have goimports yet! zsh: command not found: goimports $ go get -tool golang.org/x/tools/cmd/goimports go: added golang.org/x/mod v0.22.0 go: added golang.org/x/sync v0.10.0 go: added golang.org/x/tools v0.29.0 $ go tool goimports --help usage: goimports [flags] [path ...] Once we add a tool, we can access it by go tool <name>. ...
Over 2 years ago, I started working on some ideas to build better Kubernetes controllers. In this post, I wanted to give a bit of a retrospective on how things have gone since then. Over the years working on Istio and other projects, I observed a number of major issues with controllers: Most code was about error-prone event handling and state reconciliation, rather than business logic. Most tests, in turn, were about the same. This, in turn, made the code extremely complex, brittle, and often incorrect. This complexity lead to user facing compromise: incorrectness and performance issues. You might argue I should just write a better controller that is faster and without bugs. Maybe, but probably not. ...
JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ, GoLand, etc) have a nifty feature called Language Injection that lets you get full language features when a language is embedded within another. For example, a SQL query within a string within a Go file. A few of these come out of the box, but they are pretty limited -- I only had some XML ones prior to enabling the Databases plugin which added a few SQL ones. Fortunately, there is the ability to add custom ones. Unfortunately, this is expressed in a proprietary language with, as far as I can tell, zero documentation. ...
go run bash-script@latest
Like most other Kubernetes controllers in, Istio is written in Go and relies on the client-go library. While this provides an excellent low-level building block, usage in higher level code in Istio led to a variety of issues that led us to develop our own higher level, opinionated client for Istio. This post covers the issues we faced and how we incrementally solved them. Background knowledge At a high level, client-go provides a few layers for interactions with the API server: ...
In Analyzing Go Build Times, I went over how to analyze and understand Go build times, and what factors impact build times. A close cousin to build times is build sizes. Large binaries can lead to a variety of issues such as: Generally, slower build times Increased costs of storage Increased costs and time to distribute Increased memory usage at runtime (more on this in another article, hopefully) So its generally nice to keep them small. ...
Exploring an (unfortunately, hypothetical) CI/CD system for end to end tests on Kubernetes.
How and why to easily these fields
In the past, Istio has suffered from performance issues from OpenCensus, which was used for metrics reporting. At extremes, we saw up to 20% of CPU spent just on incrementing various metrics. This was mitigated to some extent by batching metrics updates, optimizing OpenCensus itself, and caching parts of our OpenCensus usage. At best, we got down to roughly 600ns and 3 allocations per metric update. As OpenCensus is now deprecated, I have been looking into migration to OpenTelemetry - and hoping to avoid these issues this time around. ...