Phil Pearl's Blog

We have an annual hackathon at Ravelin in the lead up to Christmas each year.

Recently at work I ran into an interesting performance problem.

I seem to be writing about one blog post a year at the moment.

Me: What’s the audience for this post?

Acute impostor syndrome.

Here at Ravelin we have a lot of data with a lot of timestamps.

When I write text I work hard to avoid being too terse.

Don’t use reflection.

Everyone loves io.Reader.

Go can have nil slices and empty slices, and they’re different.

Both of my regular readers may be wondering what happened after my last blog about potentially forking encoding/json.

It feels trite to write about the famous quote about premature optimisation being the root of all evil (I double-checked the definition of “trite” before I wrote that sentence!).

So in my mind the conversation went a little like this.

In my last post I whinged endlessly about encoding/json and in particular about the poor performance of anything with a custom marshaler.

This is a story about encoding/json in the Go standard library.

This is the 5th in a series of posts about Bad Go - a clickbaity title for posts about Go code that I’ve found frustrating because it could just be that little bit better.

This is the 4th in a series of posts about Bad Go - a clickbaity title for posts about Go code that I’ve found frustrating because it could just be that little bit better.

This is the 3rd in a series of posts about Bad Go - a clickbaity title for posts about Go that I’ve found frustrating because it could just be that little bit better.

As an old C programmer I struggle with this one: it feels completely normal for functions to return pointers to structs.

This is the first of what may be a series of blog posts on uses of Go that I’ve found frustrating.

At Ravelin we’ve migrated to Kubernetes (on GKE).

There’s a cost associated with using interfaces.

Did everyone else already know this?

Regular readers of my blog will all be aware that in Go a string is in fact a struct with a pointer to an area of memory containing the byte content of the string and an integer Len that tells you how many bytes make up the string.

The latest issue is a problem with the bulk feature extraction process we use at Ravelin (yes, we’re hiring!

Two years ago I wrote a post about building up strings with bytes.Buffer.

Many of us know that you can run Go binaries in “scratch” containers.

At Ravelin we build Go binaries, package them into scratch Docker containers and upload them to Google Cloud Registry so we can use them in a GKE cluster.

If you actually want to use the memory on your computer with Go — really use it, with gigabytes of it allocated — then you may pay a big penalty for the Go garbage collector (GC).

Some time ago I wrote about how I went to great lengths moving allocations off the Go heap into memory allocated directly from the OS in order to reduce the overhead of GC.