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Buffalo vs Go: What are the differences?
# Introduction
Buffalo and Go are two frameworks used for web development, but they have key differences that set them apart.
1. **File Structure**: In Buffalo, the file structure is opinionated and follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern, making it easier for developers to organize their code. On the other hand, Go leaves the file structure open to the developer's interpretation, providing more flexibility but requiring more effort to set up a structured codebase.
2. **Code Generation**: Buffalo comes with a powerful code generation tool, pop, which automates the creation of models, migrations, and other resources. Go does not offer such a tool, meaning developers using Go have to write more code manually.
3. **Database Integration**: Buffalo has built-in support for the pop ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) library, making it easy to work with databases in an object-oriented way. In contrast, Go does not have a specific ORM library integrated, requiring developers to choose and integrate third-party libraries for database interaction.
4. **Front-end Development**: Buffalo includes Webpack and Yarn to manage front-end assets and dependencies, making it easier to build and bundle front-end code. Go, being a programming language, does not focus on front-end development tools and requires developers to set up their own toolchain for managing front-end assets.
5. **Authentication and Authorization**: Buffalo provides built-in authentication and authorization tools, such as the ability to integrate with OAuth providers easily. In Go, developers have to implement authentication and authorization from scratch or integrate third-party packages, adding more complexity to the development process.
6. **Error Handling**: Buffalo provides a robust error handling mechanism, including built-in support for handling different types of errors and responding appropriately. Go, while offering error handling capabilities, requires developers to implement error handling logic manually, leading to potential inconsistencies in error responses.
In Summary, Buffalo offers a more opinionated and structured approach to web development with built-in tools for code generation, database integration, front-end development, and error handling, while Go provides greater flexibility but requires developers to set up these tools and components themselves.
I need some advice to choose a language for back-end development. Right now, my REST APIs were created by using Flask/Django, and I'd like to create a more reliable and more efficient API with static typing. On the one hand, Go is young, very light, and syntax like Python's, but C# has a large number of libs and more built-in methods. Which is the best solution today?
It depends.
From times to times I asked or was asked that same question. Technology aside, it's important to consider the skills and expertise that the dev team has. Whether you use language A,B or C or framework X,Y and Z, if your team has a strong background and experience with something make it count too.
I would recommend Go simply because as you mentioned, it's super light. No need to bring in the whole .NET suite to get a simple REST API up and running. Even if your API is a bit complex, Go should be able to handle it.
I started out with C# and .NET and I loved it. In my opinion, it was the perfect way to start learning the fundamentals of software development however I always felt like I was at a disadvantage when I was doing .NET development. Granted, .NET Core is now open-source and cross-platform, but I moved to Node.js simply because it is incredibly popular. I never thought I'd learn to love JavaScript it the way I did with C#, but I learned to love it pretty quickly, especially once I started using TypeScript. You get all of the benefits of C# and JavaScript all in one. If you've built a REST API with Python/Flask/Django, you'll be able to learn Node.js/Express/TypeScript well enough to migrate your API very fast and it's incredibly easy to host for free on any number of services.
I'm new to Go, I've got very little experience but the 'feel' of Go, isn't like Python in my opinion. Go has a pretty steep learning curve, much steeper than C# in my opinion. So if you are willing to consider Node/Express/TypeScript, I think you may really like it. If you're picking between Go and C#, I'd go for C# as of today, but once I am more comfortable with Go (which I anticipate being a slow process) I may change my mind.
At this moment in time, in late 2020- Node/Express/TypeScript feels like the obvious choice to me as a former C# developer.
The best language for you is the one that you know best!
Its a bit of a guess, but from your question and the difficulties you have with Python it seems to me the problem you describe is the manifestation of a bad design/architecture/code quality. These are not the problems of a language itself!
The experience you gained over the past years with your current programming language will outmatch any benefits of another language that you start from zero.
Because in the end of the day languages aren't all that different when it comes to fullfil the same task, it's more the tools, framework and ecosystem for a particular problem that make a difference.
I worked with Java, C#, Go and recently in Phyton, and I would choose Phyton over Go for WebApps, even I like compiled languages more. Go is a very simple language, I would even say maybe too simple. I can't stand all those go boilerplate if err checks, the broken filesystem, the date/time mess and many more things that aren't actually relevant for business application at all. Go has its advantages but not for WebApps.
Keep the lang and improve your skills and architecture you will benifit more from it than from a new language.
I recommend Go for backend. It's younger than C# doesn't mean it's not mature. It's already mature enough to be run on production. You can see there are already many companies in the world adopting Go as their backend business logic or tooling. I can name a few like Github, Shopify, uber, twitch, and many more. It's easier learning curve, low entry barrier, better performance than C#, better memory consumption than C#, since there's no VM/runtime needed. It's suitable for large scale system and large codebase for readibility and long maintainability. It's simpler than C# since no class, inheritance(this can cause hard to maintain software), exception, etc. You can still implement OO way in Go without those feature. Simple file structure, only main files and package files. It compiles to single binary and easy to deploy and work around it, unlike C# who compiled to IL and you need to wrap all those IL files to be run inside separated web server(even .Net/.Net Core platform provide built-in web server). For libs, don't worry, there are many open source libs you will found on Github and already adopted by many companies. Go is employed in personal, startup, even corporate level.
I suggest Go because it has a simple and clean ecosystem. The language is simple. You don’t need complex configs or installs either. You’ll be up and running very quickly. It doesn’t have as much as .NET but its standard library is more than sufficient for RESTful APIs. Concurrency is much, much easier too.
C# I’d definitely recommend later on. The .NET framework, especially core, is extremely powerful and there’s little you can’t build with it. Go won’t take you long to be productive with.
I have some systems on production using both languages. I tend to use golang if the API is small or medium size, but if I am going to build a large system definitively I use c#(asp netcore).
I would recommend C#, particularly Simplify.Web web-framework. C# is easy to start with (especially .NET Core). Simplify.Web is also easy to start with, no extra setup required for simple API, but on the other hand you have power of C# and full control over your API with ability to extend.
If you want to stick with python you may want to consider Fastapi. It uses Pydantic to give you strongly typed models and validation. It generates openapi docs for you out of the box. They have good documentation as well and they claim it is really fast.
The database your are going to connect and the needed libraries could decide. Because both are awesome languages.
I've been juggling with an app idea and am clueless about how to build it.
A little about the app:
- Social network type app ,
- Users can create different directories, in those directories post images and/or text that'll be shared on a public dashboard .
Directory creation is the main point of this app. Besides there'll be rooms(groups),chatting system, search operations similar to instagram,push notifications
I have two options:
- React Native, Python, AWS stack or
- Flutter, Go ( I don't know what stack or tools to use)
Currently, I have decided to use Python and JavaScript (especially React and Node.js) for any of my projects. Well, I have used Python with Django for a lot of things, and I would certainly recommend Django to anyone, due to its high secure authentication and authorization inbuilt system, a ready to use admin platform, template tags, and many more. Well, I guess that you would like to use Python to create the backend of your application, an API, and React Native for the frontend. Python and JavaScript (React) are on the trend these days and have a huge community, so there are many resources, tutorials, great documentation. I have not really heard anyone using Flutter and Go for applications these days, so I would not recommend it to you, it would make your life much more difficult.
Hope that helps, and good luck with your project!
I'm typically agnostic when it comes to picking languages. Whatever gets the job done, but, in this case, to figure out what's involved with what you want to do, it's going to be much more than just picking programming languages for your client and backend interfaces.
So, I'm recommending you use Flutter+Firebase as a way to figure out what you need to get done. It supports both iOS and Android out of the box, introduces you to a bunch of components you will need to think about in the future (whether you stick with Firebase or not), and the key here, is that there are tons of articles, youtube videos, and other courses you can take to pick it up pretty quickly. You could even clone an Instagram knockoff from github. Guess what else, it's all free. You might not need to worry as much about the backend since there are client libraries for Flutter/Dart for Firebase.
Some might have different opinions, and like I said, I'm usually agnostic, but in this case, you have a lot to consider. Where are you going to store the data? Are people going to need to login? Will there but customized settings the will save even if I close the app? Yeah, that's just a few questions.
Those are just a few. Lots to consider, so if you want to get something in your hand as soon as possible, try a search for flutter + firebase + chat + Instagram or something like that and have a look.
If this is for learning about how to design the system, then pick the tools are you are confortable with.
Often times, I get stuck picking the tools (and trying to learn about them) vs actually trying to design the system itself.
If you are familiar with React (check out Expo) and Django then I would recommend going with that.
For deploying your backend, I would go with a provider like https://zeit.co/ that automates a whole bunch of deployment steps with their cli tools that you might have to do with AWS.
The above listed tools will do the job, you just need to figure out your architecture(e.g models). How they will all connect. Then you can use a tool you are comfortable with to implement them.
What you need to take a look at is Apache OpenMeetings. It already does what you want, it is open source and well documented and only requires that you design the UI and plumbing required to serve you application.
Let's select right tool you feel you are good at. And selecting tools are used by large community to solve your stuck if encounter
We are converting AWS Lambdas from Java due to excessive cold start times. Usage: These lambdas handle XML and JSON payloads, they use s3, API Gateway, RDS, DynamoDB, and external API's. Most of our developers are only experienced in java. These three languages (Go, Node.js, and Python) were discussed, but no consensus has been reached yet.
I've worked with all three of these languages and also with Java developers converting to these languages and far and away Go is the easier one to convert to. With the improved cold-start times and the ease of conversion for a Java developer, it is a no-brainer for me.
The hardest part of the conversion though is going to be the lack of traditional Classes so you have to be mindful of that, but Go Structs and interfaces tend to make up for what is lost there.
Full Disclosure: I'm a 95% Go convert (from Python) at this point in time.
Although I am primarily a Javascript developer myself, I used Go to build AWS lambda in a similar scenario to yours. AWS libraries felt better integrated on the Go side, I believe due to the language itself (e.g. how JSON objects are handled in go). Besides that performance of Go is much superior. But on the cons side; community is far smaller around Go, compared to Javascript. That is easy notice if you look at repos of community-maintained libraries for Go. That can feel a bit unreliable.
Go would provide the easiest transition for Java programmers -- its IDE/tooling is second to none (just install Goland) and the deploy/distribution story is extremely clean and lends itself to work well in lambda: single, static binaries with quick startup. No need to set up a full environment or package dependencies on your lambda AMIs, just copy a file.
If you want to prioritise language familiarity, JavaScript is more like Java than the other choices; and it can be optimised to run very fast. However if you need really fast cold-start times, you can't beat Go since it's compiled. There are other things to consider, such as the massive amount of community packages and help/documentation in the JavaScript ecosystem. Go is newer but seems to be quite popular if you need something that runs fast in a single binary.
I was initially going to suggest JavaScript due to the smaller size needs of AWS Lambdas code and the larger range of libraries and community available (and to avoid Python for this). But I have to agree with the recommendations and rationale of @ayildirim above and I think you should choose any reasonable language that is low-overhead, fast startup, and best supported by AWS Lambda, and that is probably Go. I don't think you are likely to go wrong with that, while you can potentially with the others.
So I'd agree, on the strength of AWS Lambda support and the solid performance of Go, it seems like your best choice here for Lambdas (and I'm going to need to consider that myself going forward... pardon the pun).
Finding the best server-side tool for building a personal information organizer that focuses on performance, simplicity, and scalability.
performance and scalability get a prototype going fast by keeping codebase simple find hosting that is affordable and scales well (Java/Scala-based ones might not be affordable)
I've picked Node.js here but honestly it's a toss up between that and Go around this. It really depends on your background and skillset around "get something going fast" for one of these languages. Based on not knowing that I've suggested Node because it can be easier to prototype quickly and built right is performant enough. The scaffolding provided around Node.js services (Koa, Restify, NestJS) means you can get up and running pretty easily. It's important to note that the tooling surrounding this is good also, such as tracing, metrics et al (important when you're building production ready services).
You'll get more scalability and perf from go, but balancing them out I would say that you'll get pretty far with a well built Node.JS service (our entire site with over 1.5k requests/m scales easily and holds it's own with 4 pods in production.
Without knowing the scale you are building for and the systems you are using around it it's hard to say for certain this is the right route.
We’re a new startup so we need to be able to deliver quick changes as we find our product market fit. We’ve also got to ensure that we’re moving money safely, and keeping perfect records. The technologies we’ve chosen mix mature but well maintained frameworks like Django, with modern web-first and api-first front ends like GraphQL, NextJS, and Chakra. We use a little Golang sparingly in our backend to ensure that when we interact with financial services, we do so with statically compiled, strongly typed, and strictly limited and reviewed code.
You can read all about it in our linked blog post.
We have a lot of experience in JavaScript, writing our services in NodeJS allows developers to transition to the back end without any friction, without having to learn a new language. There is also the option to write services in TypeScript, which adds an expressive type layer. The semi-shared ecosystem between front and back end is nice as well, though specifically NodeJS libraries sometimes suffer in quality, compared to other major languages.
As for why we didn't pick the other languages, most of it comes down to "personal preference" and historically grown code bases, but let's do some post-hoc deduction:
Go is a practical choice, reasonably easy to learn, but until we find performance issues with our NodeJS stack, there is simply no reason to switch. The benefits of using NodeJS so far outweigh those of picking Go. This might change in the future.
PHP is a language we're still using in big parts of our system, and are still sometimes writing new code in. Modern PHP has fixed some of its issues, and probably has the fastest development cycle time, but it suffers around modelling complex asynchronous tasks, and (on a personal note) lack of support for writing in a functional style.
We don't use Python, Elixir or Ruby, mostly because of personal preference and for historic reasons.
Rust, though I personally love and use it in my projects, would require us to specifically hire for that, as the learning curve is quite steep. Its web ecosystem is OK by now (see https://www.arewewebyet.org/), but in my opinion, it is still no where near that of the other web languages. In other words, we are not willing to pay the price for playing this innovation card.
Haskell, as with Rust, I personally adore, but is simply too esoteric for us. There are problem domains where it shines, ours is not one of them.
With Python + Django it was so much faster to create a typical website like this. Using Go would take to long to launch the initial version. For example, Python could handle complex data type with less line of code. Django also has many built-in libraries and a huge ecosystem of libraries that can be easily used to build a feature.
Telegram Messenger has frameworks for most known languages, which makes easier for anyone to integrate with them. I started with Golang and soon found that those frameworks are not up to date, not to mention my experience testing on Golang is also mixed due to how their testing tool works. The natural runner-up was JS, which I'm ditching in favor of TS to make a strongly typed code, proper tests and documentation for broader usage. TypeScript allows fast prototyping and can prevent problems during code phase, given that your IDE of choice has support for a language server, and build phase. Pairing it with lint tools also allows honing code before it even hits the repositories.
1. Type safety and inferred types
Go is type safe by default, which allows you to right more reliable code and have better developer tooling, plus with the := operator, you can initialize a variable without having to define its type because it automatically gets its type from the initial value.
2. Performance
There isn't much to be said here, but on most counts go beats both Python and Node.js on performance.
3. Documentation
I'm not talking about the Go language itself, although it does have good docs. I'm talking about Go's auto generated documentation tool, which allows people to document their packages easily and works amazingly with Go's type system.
4. Compiles to binary
If you are making a local program for somebody and they don't want to download the Go compiler, you can make Go into a native binary.
5. Built for the web
Go has built in Http libraries to rival Express.js and has a HTML/Text templating system.
6. Great Concurrency
Go utilizes Goroutines to help developers utilize multiple threads easily.
Conclusion
Go is an excellent choice for any system code, especially http networking and web backends.
C# and .Net were obvious choices for us at LiveTiles given our investment in the Microsoft ecosystem. It enabled us to harness of the .Net framework to build ASP.Net MVC, WebAPI, and Serverless applications very easily. Coupled with the high productivity of Visual Studio, it's the native tongue of Microsoft technology.
Node.js has been growing in popularity, and the ability to access the global pool of Javascript developers is great. There is a decreased amount of effort for people to work across the frontend and backend, and the language itself is easy and works well for many common use cases.
Go was the other serious candidate, but it just hasn't been implemented in as many Production systems yet, and the best Go engineers I've known have been hackers, whereas we're building a robust analytics platform that requires more caution. Type safety is easily added with TypeScript, and NPM is awesomely handy.
When developing a new blockchain, we as a team chose Go lang over Java and other candidates, due to Go being (a) natively suited to concurrency - there are primitives in the language itself (goroutines, channels) that really help with reasoning about concurrency (b) super fast - build time, running, testing are all much faster that Java, this gives a far superior developer experience (c) shorter and stricter than Java - code is much shorter (less verbose), and there is usually one good way to do things, and even the code formatter that is bundled with Go is very opinionated - over a short time this makes reading other people's code far smoother than having to deal with different styles.
You should be aware that Go presently (v1.13) lacks Generics.
I chose Golang as a language to write Tango because it's super easy to get started with. I also considered Rust, but learning curve of it is much higher than in Golang. I felt like I would need to spend an endless amount of time to even get the hello world app working in Rust. While easy to learn, Golang still shows good performance, multithreading out of the box and fun to implement.
I also could choose PHP and create a phar-based tool, but I was not sure that it would be a good choice as I want to scale to be able to process Gbs of access log data
We decided to use python to write our ETLs and import them into metabase via a lambda. Before python we tried using Go, but overall go was way more verbose than Python when writing the ETLs. Go also had some issues managing memory when using the S3 upload manager library. This was a deal breaker for us that made us switch to Python.
In the end the solution was much cleaner and maintainable.
Pros of Buffalo
- Go4
- Friendly Api1
Pros of Golang
- High-performance548
- Simple, minimal syntax395
- Fun to write363
- Easy concurrency support via goroutines301
- Fast compilation times273
- Goroutines193
- Statically linked binaries that are simple to deploy180
- Simple compile build/run procedures150
- Backed by google136
- Great community136
- Garbage collection built-in53
- Built-in Testing45
- Excellent tools - gofmt, godoc etc44
- Elegant and concise like Python, fast like C39
- Awesome to Develop37
- Used for Docker26
- Flexible interface system25
- Deploy as executable24
- Great concurrency pattern24
- Open-source Integration20
- Easy to read18
- Fun to write and so many feature out of the box17
- Go is God16
- Easy to deploy14
- Powerful and simple14
- Its Simple and Heavy duty14
- Best language for concurrency13
- Concurrency13
- Rich standard library11
- Safe GOTOs11
- Clean code, high performance10
- Easy setup10
- High performance9
- Simplicity, Concurrency, Performance9
- Hassle free deployment8
- Single binary avoids library dependency issues8
- Gofmt7
- Cross compiling7
- Simple, powerful, and great performance7
- Used by Giants of the industry7
- Garbage Collection6
- Very sophisticated syntax5
- Excellent tooling5
- WYSIWYG5
- Keep it simple and stupid4
- Widely used4
- Kubernetes written on Go4
- No generics2
- Operator goto1
- Looks not fancy, but promoting pragmatic idioms1
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Cons of Buffalo
Cons of Golang
- You waste time in plumbing code catching errors42
- Verbose25
- Packages and their path dependencies are braindead23
- Google's documentations aren't beginer friendly16
- Dependency management when working on multiple projects15
- Automatic garbage collection overheads10
- Uncommon syntax8
- Type system is lacking (no generics, etc)7
- Collection framework is lacking (list, set, map)5
- Best programming language3
- A failed experiment to combine c and python1
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