Pragmatic GoLang Workshop - Follow-up

22 Jan 2018 golang · technology · workshop

As part of the Kharagpur Open Source Summit 2018, there was a Pragmatic GoLang workshop on 20th January, for 3 hours. Kshitij organized and ran it. By all accounts, it was a great success! He did a really good job with the slides and with delivering the workshop! The workshop was originally scheduled for 3 hours but it ran for nearly 4 hours, and people sat patiently and programmed alongwith him.

I was part of the team who was there helping him out with the doubts that everyone who came to the session had. These are some of the things I learnt in the workshop and some notes about GoLang for the future.

• GoLang requires the opening brace of a function to be on the same line as the closing parentheses of the function definition:

    // allowed
    func Test(a, b int) {
        ...
    }
  
    // not allowed
    func Test(a, b int)
    {
        ...
    }
  

  I remember reading about this in the Go “How to Format your Code” section and thinking to myself that this is perfect because this is the style I swear by whenever I write JavaScript!

• Go doesn’t have a float type. It’s mentioned pretty clearly in the Types RefSpec but I ended up expecting a similar construct to int. I should start using int64 instead of just int so that the code works on all architectures!

• Go’s switch doesn’t suffer from fall-through, the thing that forms the material for several of the trickiest questions about C++. This is GOOD!

• Arrays can’t be resized. Slices are references to arrays. Slices work a lot of like Vectors in C++, I now realize. Slices are a very convenient data structure.

• Functions are first-class objects in Go. With lambdas, functions being first class objects, and closures being treated without a frown, Go achieves several of the things that I love about JavaScript! (Go is such a mixture of features from every paradigm of programming)

• Channels can be closed. This enables iteration over the channel using the for-range structure!

All this stuff that I have learned about writing “Idiomatic Go” enables me to go back to year-in-twitter and leprechaun and do things the Go way.

Sidebar: I gave a talk titled Node.js, GoLang and Concurrency on 21st January! It went well (I think). The video should be up soon. I am working on an appropriate HTML page with the resources I would like to distribute with the talk. (slides, code, further reading)