Open Stack

On 05/19/2016 12:42 AM, Eric Larson wrote:
>
> Dmitry Tantsur writes:
>
>> This is pretty subjective, I would say. I personally don't feel Go
>> (especially its approach to error handling) any natural (at least no
>> more than Rust or Scala, for example). If familiarity for Python
>> developers is an argument here, mastering Cython or making OpenStack
>> run on PyPy must be much easier for a random Python developer out
>> there to seriously bump the performance. And it would not require
>> introducing a completely new language to the picture.
>
> In one sense you are correct. It is easier for a Pythonista to pick up
> Cython and use that for performance specific areas of code. At the same
> time, I'd argue that OpenStack as a community is not the same as Python
> at large. There are packaging requirements and cross project standards
> that also come into play, not to mention operators that end up bearing
> the brunt of those decisions. For example, Debian will likely not
> package a PyPy only version of Designate along with all its
> requirements. Similarly, while 50% of operators use packaged versioned,
> that means 50% work from source control to build, test, and release
> OpenStack projects.

Here you speak about distributions and packaging, and I rather agree 
with you, but then...

>
> You are correct that my position is subjective, but it is based on my
> experiences trying to operate and deploy OpenStack in addition to
> writing code. The draw of Go, in my experience, has been easily
> deploying a single binary I've been able to build and test consistently.
> The target system has doesn't require Go installed at all and it works
> on old distros. And it has been much faster.

.. this is something distributions would never do or encourage. Ask zigo 
for reasons :)

>
> Coming from Python, the reason Go has been easy to get started with is
> that it offers some protections that are useful such as memory
> management. Features such as slices are extremely similar to Python and
> go routines / channels allow supporting more complex patterns such as
> generators. Yes, you are correct, error handling is controversial, but
> at the same time, it is no better in C.
>
> I'm not an expert in Go, but from what I've seen, Go has been easier to
> build and deploy than Python, while being faster. Picking it up has been
> trivial and becoming reasonably proficient has been a quick process.
> When considered within the scope of OpenStack, it adds a minimal
> overhead for testing, packaging and deployment, especially when compared
> to C extensions, PyPy or Cython.
>
> I hope that contextualizes my opinion a bit to make clear the subjective
> aspects are based on OpenStack specific constraints.
>
> --
>
> Eric Larson         | eric.larson at rackspace.com Software Developer |
> Cloud DNS | OpenStack Designate Rackspace Hosting   | Austin, Texas
>
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