content/gopherchina.article - blog - Git at Google

 GopherChina Trip Report
 1 Jul 2015

 Robert Griesemer
 gri@golang.org

 * Introduction

 We have known for some time that Go is more popular in China than in any other
 country.
 According to Google Trends, most [[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=golang][searches for the term “golang”]] come from The People’s Republic than anywhere else.
 [[http://herman.asia/why-is-go-popular-in-china][Others]] have speculated on
 the same observation, yet so far we have had
 [[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8872400][sparse concrete information]]
 about the phenomenon.

 The first Go conference in China, [[http://gopherchina.org/][GopherChina]],
 seemed like an excellent opportunity to explore the situation by putting some
 Western Gopher feet on Chinese ground. An actual invitation made it real and I
 decided to accept and give a presentation about gofmt’s impact on software
 development.

 .image gopherchina/image04.jpg

 _Hello,_Shanghai!_

 The conference took place over an April weekend in Shanghai, in the
 [[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Puruan+Bldg,+Pudong,+Shanghai,+China][Puruan Building]]
 of the Shanghai Pudong Software Park, easily reachable by subway within an hour
 or less from Shanghai’s more central parts.
 Modelled after [[http://www.gophercon.com][GopherCon]], the conference was
 single-track, with all talks presented in a conference room that fit about 400
 attendees.
 It was organized by volunteers, lead by [[https://github.com/astaxie][Asta Xie]],
 and with robust sponsorship from major industry names. According to the
 organizers, many more people were hoping to attend than could be accommodated
 due to space constraints.

 .image gopherchina/image01.jpg

 _The_welcoming_committee_with_Asta_Xie_(2nd_from_left),_the_primary_organizer._

 Each attendee received a bag filled with the obligatory GopherChina t-shirt,
 various sponsor-related informational brochures, stickers, and the occasional
 stuffed “something” (no fluffy Gophers, though). At least one 3rd party vendor
 was advertising technical books, including several original (not translated
 from English) Go books.

 .image gopherchina/image05.jpg

 _Go_books!_

 On first impression, the average attendee seemed pretty young, which made for
 an enthusiastic crowd, and the event appeared well run.

 With the exception of my talk, all presentations were given in Mandarin and
 thus were incomprehensible to me. Asta Xie, the primary organizer, assisted
 with a few simultaneous translations whispered into my ear, and the occasional
 English slide provided additional clues: “69GB” stands out even without any
 Mandarin knowledge (more on that below). Consequently, I ended up listening to
 a handful of presentations only, and instead spent much of my time talking with
 attendees outside the main conference room. Yet judging from the slides, the
 quality of most presentations seemed high, comparable with our experience at
 GopherCon in Denver last year. Each talk got a one hour time slot which allowed
 for plenty of technical detail, and many (dozens) of questions from an
 enthusiastic audience.

 As expected, many of the presentations were about web services, backends for
 mobile applications, and so on. Some of the systems appear to be huge by any
 measure.
 For instance, a talk by [[http://gopherchina.org/user/zhouyang][Yang Zhou]]
 described a large-scale internal messaging system, used by
 [[http://www.360.cn/][Qihoo 360]], a major Chinese software firm, all written
 in Go. The presentation discussed how his team managed to reduce an original
 heap size of 69GB (!) and the resulting long GC pauses of 3-6s to more
 manageable numbers, and how they run millions of goroutines per machine, on a
 fleet of thousands of machines. A future guest blog post is planned describing
 this system in more detail.

 .image gopherchina/image03.jpg

 _Packed_conference_room_on_Saturday._

 In another presentation, [[http://gopherchina.org/user/guofeng][Feng Guo]] from
 [[https://www.daocloud.io/][DaoCloud]] talked about how they use Go in their
 company for what they call the “continuous delivery” of applications. DaoCloud
 takes care of automatically moving software hosted on GitHub (and Chinese
 equivalents) to the cloud. A software developer simply pushes a new version on
 GitHub and DaoCloud takes care of the rest: running tests,
 [[https://www.docker.com/][Dockerizing]] it, and shipping it using your
 preferred cloud service provider.

 Several speakers were from well-recognized major software firms (I showed the
 conference program to non-technical people and they easily recognized several
 of the firm’s names). Much more so than in the US, it seems Go is not just
 hugely popular with newcomers and startups, but has very much found its way
 into larger organizations and is employed at a scale that we are only starting
 to see elsewhere.

 Not being an expert in web services myself, in my presentation I veered off the
 general conference theme a bit by talking about
 [[https://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/][gofmt]] and how its widespread use has started
 to shape expectations not just for Go but other languages as well.
 I presented in English but had my slides translated to Mandarin beforehand. Due
 to the significant language barrier I wasn’t expecting too many questions on my
 talk itself.
 Instead I decided the keep it short and leave plenty of time for general
 questions on Go, which the audience appreciated.

 .image gopherchina/image06.jpg

 _No_social_event_in_China_is_complete_without_fantastic_food._

 A couple of days after the conference I visited the 4-year-old startup company
 [[http://www.qiniu.com/][Qiniu]] (“Seven Bulls”), at the invitation of its
 [[http://gopherchina.org/user/xushiwei][CEO]] Wei Hsu, facilitated and
 translated with the help of Asta Xie. Qiniu is a cloud-based storage provider
 for mobile applications; Wei Hsu presented at the conference and also happens
 to be the author of one of the first Chinese books on Go (the leftmost one in
 the picture above).

 .image gopherchina/image02.jpg
 .image gopherchina/image00.jpg

 _Qiniu_lobby,_engineering._

 Qiniu is an extremely successful all-Go shop, with about 160 employees, serving
 over 150,000 companies and developers, storing over 50 Billion files, and
 growing by over 500 Million files per day. When asked about the reasons for
 Go’s success in China, Wei Hsu is quick to answer: PHP is extremely popular in
 China, but relatively slow and not well-suited for large systems. Like in the
 US, universities teach C++ and Java as primary languages, but for many
 applications C++ is too complex a tool and Java too bulky. In his opinion, Go
 now plays the role that traditionally belonged to PHP, but Go runs much faster,
 is type safe, and scales more easily. He loves the fact that Go is simple and
 applications are easy to deploy. He thought the language to be “perfect” for
 them and his primary request was for a recommended or even standardized package
 to easily access database systems. He did mention that they had GC problems in
 the past but were able to work around them. Hopefully our upcoming 1.5 release
 will address this. For Qiniu, Go appeared just at the right time and the right
 (open source) place.

 According to Asta Xie, Qiniu is just one of many Go shops in the PRC. Large
 companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and Weibo, are now all using Go in
 one form or another. He pointed out that while Shanghai and neighboring cities
 like [[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Suzhou,+Jiangsu,+China][Suzhou]] are
 high-tech centres, even more software developers are found in the Beijing area.
 For 2016,  Asta hopes to organize a larger (1000, perhaps 1500 people)
 successor conference in Beijing.

 It appears that we have found the Go users in China: They are everywhere!

 _Some_of_the_GopherChina_materials,_including_videos,_are_now_available_alongside_Go_coursework_on_a_ [[http://www.imooc.com/view/407][_3rd_party_site_]].
	GopherChina Trip Report
	1 Jul 2015

	Robert Griesemer
	gri@golang.org

	* Introduction

	We have known for some time that Go is more popular in China than in any other
	country.
	According to Google Trends, most [[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=golang][searches for the term “golang”]] come from The People’s Republic than anywhere else.
	[[http://herman.asia/why-is-go-popular-in-china][Others]] have speculated on
	the same observation, yet so far we have had
	[[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8872400][sparse concrete information]]
	about the phenomenon.

	The first Go conference in China, [[http://gopherchina.org/][GopherChina]],
	seemed like an excellent opportunity to explore the situation by putting some
	Western Gopher feet on Chinese ground. An actual invitation made it real and I
	decided to accept and give a presentation about gofmt’s impact on software
	development.

	.image gopherchina/image04.jpg

	_Hello,_Shanghai!_

	The conference took place over an April weekend in Shanghai, in the
	[[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Puruan+Bldg,+Pudong,+Shanghai,+China][Puruan Building]]
	of the Shanghai Pudong Software Park, easily reachable by subway within an hour
	or less from Shanghai’s more central parts.
	Modelled after [[http://www.gophercon.com][GopherCon]], the conference was
	single-track, with all talks presented in a conference room that fit about 400
	attendees.
	It was organized by volunteers, lead by [[https://github.com/astaxie][Asta Xie]],
	and with robust sponsorship from major industry names. According to the
	organizers, many more people were hoping to attend than could be accommodated
	due to space constraints.

	.image gopherchina/image01.jpg

	_The_welcoming_committee_with_Asta_Xie_(2nd_from_left),_the_primary_organizer._

	Each attendee received a bag filled with the obligatory GopherChina t-shirt,
	various sponsor-related informational brochures, stickers, and the occasional
	stuffed “something” (no fluffy Gophers, though). At least one 3rd party vendor
	was advertising technical books, including several original (not translated
	from English) Go books.

	.image gopherchina/image05.jpg

	_Go_books!_

	On first impression, the average attendee seemed pretty young, which made for
	an enthusiastic crowd, and the event appeared well run.

	With the exception of my talk, all presentations were given in Mandarin and
	thus were incomprehensible to me. Asta Xie, the primary organizer, assisted
	with a few simultaneous translations whispered into my ear, and the occasional
	English slide provided additional clues: “69GB” stands out even without any
	Mandarin knowledge (more on that below). Consequently, I ended up listening to
	a handful of presentations only, and instead spent much of my time talking with
	attendees outside the main conference room. Yet judging from the slides, the
	quality of most presentations seemed high, comparable with our experience at
	GopherCon in Denver last year. Each talk got a one hour time slot which allowed
	for plenty of technical detail, and many (dozens) of questions from an
	enthusiastic audience.

	As expected, many of the presentations were about web services, backends for
	mobile applications, and so on. Some of the systems appear to be huge by any
	measure.
	For instance, a talk by [[http://gopherchina.org/user/zhouyang][Yang Zhou]]
	described a large-scale internal messaging system, used by
	[[http://www.360.cn/][Qihoo 360]], a major Chinese software firm, all written
	in Go. The presentation discussed how his team managed to reduce an original
	heap size of 69GB (!) and the resulting long GC pauses of 3-6s to more
	manageable numbers, and how they run millions of goroutines per machine, on a
	fleet of thousands of machines. A future guest blog post is planned describing
	this system in more detail.

	.image gopherchina/image03.jpg

	_Packed_conference_room_on_Saturday._

	In another presentation, [[http://gopherchina.org/user/guofeng][Feng Guo]] from
	[[https://www.daocloud.io/][DaoCloud]] talked about how they use Go in their
	company for what they call the “continuous delivery” of applications. DaoCloud
	takes care of automatically moving software hosted on GitHub (and Chinese
	equivalents) to the cloud. A software developer simply pushes a new version on
	GitHub and DaoCloud takes care of the rest: running tests,
	[[https://www.docker.com/][Dockerizing]] it, and shipping it using your
	preferred cloud service provider.

	Several speakers were from well-recognized major software firms (I showed the
	conference program to non-technical people and they easily recognized several
	of the firm’s names). Much more so than in the US, it seems Go is not just
	hugely popular with newcomers and startups, but has very much found its way
	into larger organizations and is employed at a scale that we are only starting
	to see elsewhere.

	Not being an expert in web services myself, in my presentation I veered off the
	general conference theme a bit by talking about
	[[https://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/][gofmt]] and how its widespread use has started
	to shape expectations not just for Go but other languages as well.
	I presented in English but had my slides translated to Mandarin beforehand. Due
	to the significant language barrier I wasn’t expecting too many questions on my
	talk itself.
	Instead I decided the keep it short and leave plenty of time for general
	questions on Go, which the audience appreciated.

	.image gopherchina/image06.jpg

	_No_social_event_in_China_is_complete_without_fantastic_food._

	A couple of days after the conference I visited the 4-year-old startup company
	[[http://www.qiniu.com/][Qiniu]] (“Seven Bulls”), at the invitation of its
	[[http://gopherchina.org/user/xushiwei][CEO]] Wei Hsu, facilitated and
	translated with the help of Asta Xie. Qiniu is a cloud-based storage provider
	for mobile applications; Wei Hsu presented at the conference and also happens
	to be the author of one of the first Chinese books on Go (the leftmost one in
	the picture above).

	.image gopherchina/image02.jpg
	.image gopherchina/image00.jpg

	_Qiniu_lobby,_engineering._

	Qiniu is an extremely successful all-Go shop, with about 160 employees, serving
	over 150,000 companies and developers, storing over 50 Billion files, and
	growing by over 500 Million files per day. When asked about the reasons for
	Go’s success in China, Wei Hsu is quick to answer: PHP is extremely popular in
	China, but relatively slow and not well-suited for large systems. Like in the
	US, universities teach C++ and Java as primary languages, but for many
	applications C++ is too complex a tool and Java too bulky. In his opinion, Go
	now plays the role that traditionally belonged to PHP, but Go runs much faster,
	is type safe, and scales more easily. He loves the fact that Go is simple and
	applications are easy to deploy. He thought the language to be “perfect” for
	them and his primary request was for a recommended or even standardized package
	to easily access database systems. He did mention that they had GC problems in
	the past but were able to work around them. Hopefully our upcoming 1.5 release
	will address this. For Qiniu, Go appeared just at the right time and the right
	(open source) place.

	According to Asta Xie, Qiniu is just one of many Go shops in the PRC. Large
	companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and Weibo, are now all using Go in
	one form or another. He pointed out that while Shanghai and neighboring cities
	like [[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Suzhou,+Jiangsu,+China][Suzhou]] are
	high-tech centres, even more software developers are found in the Beijing area.
	For 2016, Asta hopes to organize a larger (1000, perhaps 1500 people)
	successor conference in Beijing.

	It appears that we have found the Go users in China: They are everywhere!

	_Some_of_the_GopherChina_materials,_including_videos,_are_now_available_alongside_Go_coursework_on_a_ [[http://www.imooc.com/view/407][_3rd_party_site_]].