I’ve rewritten my JS project in Golang and want to share my experience.

Publish Date: Aug 22 '24

7 8

Two years ago I've built for myself a small server in NodeJS - a SQLite proxy over HTTP. It's useful when you have datasets that you need to share with consumers over the network. And after a number of refactors and new requirements, now I have finally decided to rewrite the proxy in Golang for better distribution and memory efficiency. It went so well that I’ve rewritten almost everything in Go even the parts I haven't initially intended to rewrite, and now I believe that 50-70% of what I did before could be better if I used Go along with NodeJS. So, I've prooved to myself that Golang is damn efficient for any backend-heavy web development and almost equal to NodeJS in terms of dev velocity. Even creating a NAPI addons with Go is super easy compared to C++ just because of cross-compilation.

Now let's talk about one Golang shortcoming, and it's not about programming.
For the last year I mostly work as freelance dev. taking gigs and sometimes short contract work. I used Golang ocasionally, mostly when my tasks were related to blockchain, and I've even written couple microservices in Go.

Now I've looked into the job market and I am a bit dissapointed that crypto/finace domain is primary for Golang on the job market :(. And most companies require 3-4 years Go exp (even for gigs), which is hard to get if you don't work for FANG or crypto-finance field.
Golang on the job market seems like RoR for blockchain when I look at my job feeds, kind of "loked in domain language".

If smaller companies and startups also favoured Go, they could've done so many things better, and job market would look differently. I believe that Go can add more value in the products. And yes - one pet project gave me this perspective.

Talking about the pet project.
I present DAL: https://github.com/nesterow/dal

It is in early alpha, because currently only I use it. At the current stage the project can be useful for research, especially for someone who wants to write a native addon for NodeJS or wants to port their libraries to Golang, or to roast me if someone has time :)

The client part is written in TypeScript, the server can be used as standalone binary (best perf) or a nodejs addon.

Peace ✌️

Comments 8 total

Akash KavaAug 22, 2024
Good start, but I have gone one step ahead of go and have created entity access inspired from entity framework and the syntax is lot cleaner (basically JavaScript syntax is translated to SQL) like a.orders.some(o => o.amount > 100) is translated to EXISTS SELECT 1 FROM "orders" as o1 INNER JOIN accounts a1 on a1.accountID = o1.orderID WHERE o1.amount > 100. And it has lot of other cool features such as circuit breaker workflows etc.

github.com/entity-access/entity-ac...
- Anton NesterovAug 22, 2024
  Nice work!
  My original goal was to create a proxy, everythig else came after. The proxy uses a binary protocol so ast would complicate things in this case (client would become too fat). I picked the "mongodb approach" for query builder - which is basically parsing flat serializable structures as query parts. This approach has advantages and disadvatages, for example, the queries are json-serializable, inserts and updates can accept blobs and transfer them as binary over network, but yes - the syntax is less appealing. The builder itself covers 90% needs - everything esle can be done as raw sql query - and I can name a number of other flaws in my solution...
- JoelBonetR 🥇Aug 23, 2024
  I can't see how this is "a step ahead of Go". In the ORM scenario you may want to check one of those Sequelize, Drizzle, TypeORM or Prisma. It's a very good exercise to try and create one of your own, though, the same way I find rewriting a project using a different language a very nice thing to try out!
  - Akash KavaAug 27, 2024
    Entity Access isn't just ORM, it is complete JavaScript API compiler from browser to postgres, Entity Access inspects client side query and injects security measures around the query which reduces writing business code on server side. Server side only contains entity and filter configurations. It is similar to GraphQL, but instead of GraphQL language, it uses simple JavaScript to translate queries.
DanielAug 23, 2024
CONTACT Mr David Mark call (+2348118511628) or WhatsApp him through this number (+2348118511628) Hello everyone My name is Hulkers James am from Los Angeles i am here to give a testimony on how I join the illuminati brotherhood, I was trying to join this organization for so many years now,I was scammed by fake agent in south Africa and Nigeria,I was down,I could not feed my self and my family anymore and I tried to make money by all miss but all invail, I was afraid to contact any illuminati agent because they have eat my money,One day I come across a post of someone giving a testimony, thanking a man called David Mark of being helping him to join the illuminati brotherhood, then I look at the man phone number that was written there, it was a nigeria number I was afraid to contact him because a nigerian agent eat my $6000 and go away with the money then I was very tired, confused and I decided to contact the person that was given the testimony and i called him and I communicated with him on phone calls before he started telling me his own story about when he wanted to join, he told me everything to do, then I made up my mind and called the agent called David Mark and he told me everything to do, and I was initiated, surprisely I was given my benefit of being a new member of the great illuminati brotherhood I was so happy, For those of you trying to join this organization this is your opportunity for you to join CONTACT MR David Mark call (+2348118511628) or WhatsApp him (+2348118511628)
wa.me/message/IQQWKAOGU64IP1
Gabriel GuzmanAug 23, 2024
Go is also quite common in companies that are building developer platforms, as well as in the infra as code world of devops.
- Anton NesterovAug 23, 2024
  Agreed, Go is the king in this fields - the devs know what is best for them.
  I am maybe biased in my opinion about the jobs market by the search/recomendation algorithms. After all, what I see first on the job listings is a sum of different circumstances.
  
  I just wish that more companies considered "Golang & Node" not "Golang vs Node" when they pick a stack. Replace Node with Python,PHP,etc. It's wishful thinking anyway, if something is good doesn't mean it's good for a particular company.
Joaquín.Sep 19, 2024

If smaller companies and startups also favoured Go, they could've done so many things better, and job market would look differently. I believe that Go can add more value in the products. And yes - one pet project gave me this perspective.

Couldn't agree more. GO syntax and ecosystem is quite easy to get good at for any person with a JavaScript background, and the performance it's close to that of Rust. More focus should be on pushing GO into dev's ecosystem instead of htmx and other tooling nonsense.

Add comment

Anton Nesterov @nesterow

I’ve rewritten my JS project in Golang and want to share my experience.

Comments 8 total