All articles tagged #go

Go standard library makes it super easy to start an HTTP server:

package main

import "net/http"

func main() {
    http.HandleFunc("/", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
        w.Write([]byte("Hello there!\n"))
    })

    http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

...or send an HTTP request:

package main

import "net/http"

func main() {
    resp, err := http.Get("http://example.com/")
    body, err := io.ReadAll(resp.Body)
}

In just ~10 lines of code, I can get a server up and running or fetch a real web page! In contrast, creating a basic HTTP server in C would take hundreds of lines, and anything beyond basics would require third-party libraries.

The Go snippets from above are so short because they rely on powerful high-level abstractions of the net and net/http packages. Go pragmatically chooses to optimize for frequently used scenarios, and its standard library hides many internal socket details behind these abstractions, making lots of default choices on the way. And that's very handy, but...

What if I need to fine-tune net/http sockets before initiating the communication? For instance, how can I set some socket options like SO_REUSEPORT or TCP_QUICKACK?

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When I was a kid, I used to spend days tinkering with woodworking tools. I was lucky enough to have a wide set of tools at my disposal. However, there was no one around to give me a hint about what tool to use when. So, I quickly came up with a heuristic: if my fingers and a tool survived an exercise, I've used the right tool; if either the fingers or the tool got damaged, I'd try other tools for the same task until I find the right one. And it worked quite well for me! Since then, I'm an apologist of the idea that every tool is good only for a certain set of tasks.

A programming language is yet another kind of tool. When I became a software developer, I adapted my heuristic to the new reality: if, while solving a task using a certain language, I suffer too much (fingers damage) or I need to hack things more often than not (tool damage), it's a wrong choice of a language.

Since the language is just a tool, my programming toolbox is defined by the tasks I work on the most often. Since 2010, I've worked in many domains, starting from web UI development and ending with writing code for infrastructure components. I find pleasure in being a generalist (jack of all trades), but there is always a pitfall of spreading yourself too thin (master of none). So, for the past few years, I've been trying to limit my sphere of expertise with the server-side, distributed systems, and infrastructure. Hence, the following choice of languages.

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Maybe the scenario I'm going to describe is just a silly bug no seasoned Go developer would ever make, but it is what it is.

I'm not an expert in Go but I do write code in this language from time to time. My cumulative number of LOC is probably still below 100 000 but it's definitely not just a few hundred lines of code. Go always looked like a simple language to me. But also it looked safe. Apparently, it's not as simple and safe as I've thought...

Here is a synthetic piece of code illustrating the erroneous logic I stumbled upon recently:

// main.go
package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "sync"
)

func main() {
    mutex := &sync.Mutex{}

    f := func() {
        fmt.Println("In f()")

        defer func() {
            if r := recover(); r != nil {
                fmt.Println("Recovered", r)
            }
        }()

        dogs := []string{"Lucky"}

        mutex.Lock()
        fmt.Println("Last dog's name is", dogs[len(dogs)])
        mutex.Unlock()
    }

    f()

    fmt.Println("About to get a deadlock in main()")
    mutex.Lock()
}

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I've been working on adding basic images support to my experimental container manager and to my surprise, the task turned to be more complex than I initially expected. I spent some time looking for ways to manage container images directly from my application code. There is plenty of tools out there (docker, containerd, podman, buildah, cri-o, etc) providing image management capabilities. However, if you don't want to have a dependency on an external daemon running in your system, or you don't feel like shelling out for exec-ing a command-line tool from the code, the options are at best limited.

I've reviewed a bunch of the said tools focusing on the underlying means they use to deal with images and at last, I found two appealing libraries. The first one is github.com/containers/image library "[...] aimed at working in various way with containers' images and container image registries". The second one is github.com/containers/storage "[...] which aims to provide methods for storing filesystem layers, container images, and containers". The libraries are meant to be used in conjunction and form a very powerful image management tandem. But unfortunately, I could not find a sufficient amount of documentation, especially how to get started kind of it.

Without the docs the only way to learn how to use the libraries for me was to analyze the code of their dependants (most prominently - buildah and cri-o). It took me a while to forge a working example which is capable of:

• pulling images from remote repositories;
• storing images locally;
• creating and mounting containers (i.e. writable instances of images).

In the rest of the article, I'll try to show how to use the libraries to perform the said task and highlight the most interesting parts of this journey.

Disclaimer: This is by no means an attempt to fully or even partially document the libraries!

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I spent half a year deep-diving into the world of containers and their orchestration. I have been enjoying it very much and learned a lot. On my journey, I need to tackle lots of interesting and specific concepts. But there is one commonality almost every project in this area possesses. When it comes to containers - the Go programming language is ubiquitous!

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