Francesco Allertsen - Issue #62

Happy Birthday! :-)

Just wanted to add this article here because it’s quite short and has a lot of interesting numbers about the Go community and some interesting talks from Go conferences this year.

I think the language will expand a lot in the coming years, and hopefully it doesn’t evolve in the wrong directory, but I’m quite confident about it.

This is a very interesting beginning of the article. Last year around this time Cloudflare announced a new product called “Workers”, that can run some simple code directly on the Cloudflare datacenter before (or without) reaching your origin server. This improves the latency problem because your code runs as close as possible to the customers on Cloudflare datacenter. I have never personally used that product, but looks very similar to other Serverless projects from other providers.

I found this article extremely interesting because it shows that they are not using any container technology to run this product (like all the other providers), instead they use a feature available on the Javascript engine V8: Isolate.

The article explains in-depth the benefits of using this technology compared to the containers, and I agree it has a lot of performance and memory usage benefits. Although I think that the limitation (explained also in the document) that you can only write Javascript code can be critical for some companies. A very interesting answer to this problem in the article is that many programming languages are starting to adopt the WebAssembly technology, and this would allow the customers to write a code in Go, and then convert it into WebAssembly and run it on Workers. I don’t know how well this could work, but I didn’t thought about it as a long-term prospective. It could be that this is the future path, and at that point they are already way ahead of the competition because of all the benefits that the V8 isolate has compared to the containers.

You probably use almost everyday the command cat, and you don’t think about the history of this simple command. I use it daily and still I find this article very interesting.

This article shows the history of the cat command and how the source code evolved over the years (fun fact: the original implementation is from 1969, even before C was invented). On top of that there are very interested links and resources if you are curious about the history of UNIX and how the original code was working.

This is a very misleading title from an article of Jeff Atwood. In reality this is part of the story of the book “Masters of Doom” (which I suggest every programmer interested in game development to read).

Jeff is quoting part of the book and explains why things have changed over the years, and why John Carmack and John Romero completely changed the game industry.

This is the conclusion of the article, and I agree with it (and that’s the reason of the title of the article).