Golang Nugget - Feb 10, 2025

PostgreSQL Client-side connection pooling in Golang using pgxpool — When you work with databases, creating a connection can be an expensive operation. That’s when a connection pool can help reuse already established connections. The pgxpool library can help manage PostgreSQL connection pooling in Go.

JSON - The Fine Print: Part 2 - Emitting JSON — The encoding/json package has two main APIs: Marshal and NewEncoder. The Marshal function returns a []byte, while the NewEncoder function writes to an io.Writer. The question is: When should you use one API over the other, and how do you stream JSON over HTTP?

Go Data Structures — This is an old article (2009) from Russ Cox about Go data structures. He talks about the memory layouts of slices, strings, structs, and pointers, and the differences between make and new. Until recently, Russ used to be a core member of the Go development team, and he played a significant role in shaping the language.

proposal: sync/v2: new package — There’s a new proposal about adding a new sync package. The existing sync package was designed before generics were introduced, and therefore the current Map and Pool types use any instead of generics. sync/v2 (if accepted) aims to address this issue by introducing more type-safe Map and Pool types by utilising generic types.

Go's map does not shrink — In Go, maps don’t shrink. So if you build a very large map and then remove everything, the memory footprint stays the same, even in 1.24 with Swiss Table. You can use pointers (or let the language handle it for values larger than 128B), but the underlying structure doesn’t change with deletion.

Go's Concurrency Decoded: Goroutine Scheduling — Go concurrency is based on the GPM model, where G represents a goroutine, M represents a kernel-level thread, and P is the logical processor. This article provides a high-level overview of how Golang manages concurrency. I’d suggest watching "Queues, Fairness, and The Go Scheduler" from GopherCon afterward if you are interested in understanding the scheduler.

github.com/bytedance/sonic — Sonic is a blazingly fast JSON serializing & deserializing library, accelerated by JIT (just-in-time compiling) and SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data). It’s developed by Bytedance (TikTok), and more than 50% of the codebase is Assembly. You need Go 1.17+ and ARM64/AMD64 to use it.

github.com/magefile/mage — Mage is a make-like build tool using Go. You write plain-old Go functions, and Mage automatically uses them as Makefile-like runnable targets.

github.com/asdf-vm/asdf — asdf is a CLI tool that can manage multiple language runtime versions on a per-project basis. It is like gvm, nvm, rbenv, & pyenv (and more) all in one! The latest version is now rewritten in Go. What’s cool?

github.com/micro/micro — Micro is an open‐source, API‐first development platform designed to simplify building and managing cloud services. In essence, Micro provides a collection of tools and services that abstract much of the complexity involved in developing distributed systems.