Go: code that grows with grace

Andrew Gerrand
Google Sydney
http://andrewgerrand.com
@enneff
http://golang.org

* Go

You may have heard of Go.

It's my favorite language. I think you'll like it, too.

* Why Go?

Needed a language for building servers* at Google, with an emphasis on:

- simplicity,
- ease of use,
- readability,
- comprehensibility,
- efficiency,
- concurrency,
- scale.

(* Go has since proven to be a great general-purpose language.)

* What is Go?

An open source (BSD licensed) project:

- Language specification,
- Small runtime (garbage collector, scheduler, etc),
- Two compilers (`gc` and `gccgo`),
- 'Batteries included' standard library,
- Tools (build, fetch, test, document, profile, format),
- Documentation.

As of September 2012 we have more than 300 contributors.

* Go has gophers

.image chat/gophers.jpg

* Hello, go

.play chat/support/hello.go

* Hello, net

.play chat/support/hello-net.go

* Interfaces

Hey neato! We just used `Fprintln` to write to a net connection.

That's because a `Fprintln` writes to an `io.Writer`, and `net.Conn` is an `io.Writer`.

.code chat/support/hello-net.go /Fprintln/
.code chat/support/defs.go /Fprintln/
.code chat/support/defs.go /type.Writer/,/^}/
.code chat/support/defs.go /type.Conn/,/^}/

* An echo server

.play chat/support/echo-no-concurrency.go

* A closer look at io.Copy

.code chat/support/echo-no-concurrency.go /Copy/
.code chat/support/defs.go /Copy/,/func/
.code chat/support/defs.go /type.Conn/,/^}/
.code chat/support/defs.go /type.Writer/,/^}/
.code chat/support/defs.go /type.Reader/,/^}/

* Goroutines

Goroutines are lightweight threads that are managed by the Go runtime. To run a function in a new goroutine, just put "`go`" before the function call.

.play chat/support/goroutines.go

* A concurrent echo server

.play chat/support/echo.go

* "Chat roulette"

In this talk we'll look at a simple program, based on the popular "chat roulette" site.

In short:

- a user connects,
- another user connects,
- everything one user types is sent to the other.

* Design

The chat program is similar to the echo program. With echo, we copy a connection's incoming data back to the same connection.

For chat, we must copy the incoming data from one user's connection to another's.

Copying the data is easy. As in real life, the hard part is matching one partner with another.

* Design diagram

.image chat/diagrams.png

* Channels

Goroutines communicate via channels. A channel is a typed conduit, like a Unix pipe. Channels may be synchronous (unbuffered) or asynchronous (buffered).

.play chat/support/chan.go

* Select

A select statement is like a switch, but it selects over channel operations (and chooses exactly one of them).

.play chat/support/select.go

* Modifying echo to create chat

In the accept loop, we replace the call to `io.Copy`:

.code chat/support/echo.go /for {/,/\n	}/

with a call to a new function, `match`:

.code chat/tcp-simple/chat.go /for {/,/\n	}/

* The matcher

The `match` function simultaneously tries to send and receive a connection on a channel.

- If the send succeeds, the connection has been handed off to another goroutine, so the function exits and the goroutine shuts down.
- If the receive succeeds, a connection has been received from another goroutine. The current goroutine then has two connections, so it starts a chat session between them.

.code chat/tcp-simple/chat.go /var.partner/,/^}/

* The conversation

The chat function sends a greeting to each connection and then copies data from one to the other, and vice versa.

Notice that it launches another goroutine so that the copy operations may happen concurrently.

.code chat/tcp-simple/chat.go /func.chat/,/^}/

* Demo

* Error handling

It's important to clean up when the conversation is over. To do this we send the error value from each `io.Copy` call to a channel, log any non-nil errors, and close both connections.

.code chat/tcp/chat.go /func.chat/,/^}/
.code chat/tcp/chat.go /func.cp/,/^}/

* Demo

* Taking it to the web 

"Cute program," you say, "But who wants to chat over a raw TCP connection?"

Good point. Let's modernize it by turning it a web application.

Instead of TCP sockets, we'll use websockets.

We'll serve the user interface with Go's standard `net/http` package, and websocket support is provided by the `websocket` package from the `go.net` sub-repository,

* Hello, web

.play chat/support/hello-web.go

* Using the http and websocket packages

.code chat/http/chat.go /package/,/^}/

* Serving the HTML and JavaScript

.code chat/http/html.go /import/
.code chat/http/html.go /func/,/<script>/
.code chat/http/html.go /websocket.=/,/onClose/
.code chat/http/html.go /<\/html>/,$

* Adding a socket type

We can't just use a `websocket.Conn` instead of the `net.Conn`, because a `websocket.Conn` is held open by its handler function. Here we use a channel to keep the handler running until the socket's `Close` method is called.

.code chat/http/chat.go /type.socket/,/^}/
.code chat/http/chat.go /func.+socket.+Close/,/^}/
.code chat/http/chat.go /func.socketHandler/,/^}/

* Demo

* Struct embedding

Go supports a kind of "mix-in" functionality with a feature known as "struct embedding". The embedding struct inherits the embedded type's methods.

.code chat/support/embed.go /type/,$

* Relieving loneliness

What if you connect, but there's noone there?

Wouldn't it be nice if we could synthesize a chat partner?

Let's do it.

* Generating text with markov chains

.code chat/support/markov.txt

* Generating text with markov chains

Fortunately, the Go docs include a markov chain implementation:

.link http://golang.org/doc/codewalk/markov

We'll use a version that has been modified to be safe for concurrent use.

.code chat/markov/markov.go /Chain/,/{/
.code chat/markov/markov.go /Write/,/{/
.code chat/markov/markov.go /Generate/,/{/

* Feeding the chain

We will use all text that enters the system to build the markov chains.
To do this we split the socket's `ReadWriter` into a `Reader` and a `Writer`,
and feed all incoming data to the `Chain` instance.

.code chat/markov/chat.go /type.socket/,/^}/
.code chat/markov/chat.go /var.chain/,/^}/

* The markov bot

.code chat/markov/chat.go /\/\/.Bot/,/^}/
.code chat/markov/chat.go /type.bot/,/^}/
.code chat/markov/chat.go /func.+bot.+Write/,/^}/
.code chat/markov/chat.go /func.+bot.+speak/,/^}/

* Integrating the markov bot

The bot should jump in if a real partner doesn't join.
To do this, we add a case to the select that triggers after 10 seconds, starting a chat between the user's socket and a bot.

.code chat/markov/chat.go /func.match/,/^}/

The `chat` function remains untouched.

* Demo

* Discussion

* Further reading

All about Go:

.link http://golang.org

The slides for this talk:

.link http://talks.golang.org/2012/chat.slide

"Go Concurrency Patterns" by Rob Pike:

.link http://tinyurl.com/goconcurrent