1. Golang Skills Training
Sofiane Imadali, Ayoub Bousselmi
Session 1: generalities and methodology
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 1

2. Agenda
 Goals
 General introduction
 Origins and evolution
 Main characteristics, Context and Why a new language
 Journey from Python to Go (with code snippets)
 A first code dive: the Prometheus case
 Methodology
 Define steps for training (see ToC of tour & Trello)
 Long-term project proposal
 Tools (tour, github/gitlab (?), wekan …)
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 2

3. Goals
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 3

4. Goals
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 4
 Understand the basics of the language and be
autonomous to read, modify and create go code
 Dive into a long term collaborative project to
develop something meaningful in go
 Start creating and integrating Prometheus
exporters in go

5. General introduction
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 5

6. Origins and evolution
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 6
First appeared
 November 10, 2009; 9 years ago
Designed by
 Robert Griesemer: known for his work at the Java HotSpot Virtual
Machine
 Rob Pike: member of the Unix team at Bell Labs, worked at the Plan 9
and Inferno operating systems and the Limbo programming language
 Ken Thompson: (member of the Unix team at Bell Labs, one of the
fathers of C, Unix and Plan 9 operating systems, co-developed UTF-8
with Rob Pike
Stable release
 1.12.4 / April 11th, 2019;

7. Origins and evolution
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 7
Go: TIOBE’s Programming Language of 2016

8. Main characteristics, Context and Why a new language
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 8
• Go is a language designed from the ground up, as a ‘C for the 21st
century’.
• C-family: C++, Java and C#
• Concurrency mechanism: inspired by Tony Hoare’s CSP (Communicating
Sequential Processes) theory as used by the Erlang language.
• Completely open-source language, distributed with a BSD license, so it can
be used by everybody even for commercial purposes without a fee
• Resemblance with the C-syntax, more concise and clean.
• It also has characteristics of a dynamic language, so Python and Ruby
programmers feel more comfortable with it.

9. Main characteristics, Context and Why a new language
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 9
• C/C++ did not evolve with the computing landscape: so there is a definite
need for a new systems language, appropriate for needs of our computing
era
• In contrast to computing power, software development is not considerably
faster or more successful (considering the number of failed projects) and
applications still grow in size, so a new low-level language, but equipped with
higher concepts, is needed
• Before Go a developer had to choose between fast execution but slow and
not efficient building (like C++), efficient compilation (but not so fast
execution, like .NET or Java), or ease of programming (but slower execution,
like the dynamic languages): Go is an attempt to combine all three wishes:
efficient and thus fast compilation, fast execution, ease of programming

10. 16/04/2019 Golang Skills 10
When you
propose to
develop
in Go…

11. Journey
from
Python to
Go
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 11
Comparing
programming
languages is like
comparing
sport cars…

12. Journey from Python to Go
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 12
Python Go
#1 Paradigm
Object oriented
Imperative
Functional
Procedural
Reflective
Procedural
Functional
Concurrent

13. Journey from Python to Go
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 13
Python Go
#2 Execution
Interpreted
(compiled to bytecode)
Garbage collected
Compiled
(statically linked,
dynamically linked)
Garbage collected

14. Journey from Python to Go
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 14
Python Go
#3 Type system
Dynamically typed Statically typed

15. Journey from Python to Go
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 15
Python Go
#4 Syntax
Indentation { opening and closing }
braces

16. Journey from Python to Go
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 16
Python Go
#5 Concurrency
Take time to implement
Extra effort to use all
the available processing
power
simple
built-in

17. Journey from Python to Go
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 17
Python Go
#6 Dependencies Management
pip install
requirements.txt
go get
go mod
vendor
Others (glide, GoPkg)

18. 16/04/2019 Golang Skills 18
When you
have
choose…

19. Journey from Python to Go
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 19
Python Ruby Node.js C/C++ Java Go
Semicolons N N Y Y Y N*
Curly braces N N* Y Y Y Y
Static types N N N Y Y Y
Concurrency -
simplicity
N N Y N N Y
Concurrency –
multi-core
N N N Y Y Y
Compiled N N N Y Y Y
OO: classes,
inheritance, etc.
Y Y Y Y Y N*

20. A first code dive:
the Prometheus case
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 20

21. Methodology
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 21

22. 16/04/2019 Golang Skills 22
Project
Training
Methodology

23. 16/04/2019 Golang Skills 23
Methodology
It’s about finding the balance between training, a project,
and not being bored or lost

24. 16/04/2019 Golang Skills 24
Training
 Generalities (today)
 Environment
 Installation, IDE, Books, and more
 The language
 Basics
 Methods, Interfaces
 Concurrency
 Idiomatic go and common errors
 Production ready code
 Project structure
 Unitests, Code coverage, and CI/CD
 Versioning your code

25. 16/04/2019 Golang Skills 25
Project
 Definition (today)
 Scrum
 Tasks and goals
 Tools to use
 Contributions in parallel with the training
 Code review and releases
 Proposal: a basic Prometheus exporter
 Using a metrics generator/collector library
 Export them to Prometheus
 Make a CLI for the tool
 Make a dashboard or API (?)

26.  Source code
 Project, code, and review
 Tour and playground
 For the training, learning, and testing
 Project tasks
 Scrum-like, collaboration
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 26
Tools
 Github + Travis
 Gitlab + Gitlab-CI
 Wekan
 Trello

27. Thanks
sofiane.imadali@orange.com
ayoub.bousselmi@orange.com
16/04/2019 Golang Skills 27