Go beyond Goroutines: introducing the Reactive paradigm

Tabs are the recommended indentation method for Go code. It is interesting that they switched after the first example, though.

Seems like it got fixed just now. Thanks for doing it. It looks much better now :)

I suspect this is substacks default styling. It actually doesn’t set the tab-size which defaults to 8. However there seems to be some funky font-rendering going on so it adds an extra half (or maybe three-quarters) of a space per tab-character.

You can see this your self if you edit the markup in your browser’s inspector and add `contenteditable` attribute to the surrounding <pre>, then navigate down a line... it will jump forward just by slightly less then a column per indent level.

I have never heard of anyone using Go for realtime systems because of its GC and preemptive scheduler.

I don't know. I've seen "realtime" used quite often in a sort of colloquial sense, where it means something fairly different from "hard realtime system" as an embedded systems person might use the term. I think there's a pretty large base of people who use "realtime" to mean something that others might call "near real-time" or just "continually updating" or something along those lines, where's there's no implication of needing nanosecond level predictable scheduling and what-not.

That's not to say that the article isn't AI generated, or whatever. Just that I wouldn't necessarily see the use of the "realtime" nomenclature as strong support for that possibility.

reactive is on the decline in the java world post-loom (virtual threads) and should be nobody's first choice. writing plain old imperative code is vastly simpler to write / debug / reason about.

Brian Goetz even went as far as saying loom is going to kill reactive entirely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9si7gK94gLo&t=1165s

I feel like Go's concept of readability is very Blub-oriented[1]. Can a Blub programmer read this line? Then it's readable. Sometimes Go fans would say that this code:

  var result := []string{}
  for i = 0; i < items.Length(); i++ {
    item := items.Get(i)
    if item < threshold {
      result = append(result, converToString(item))
    }
  }

I more readable than this code:

  return items
    .filter { it < threshold }
    .map    { convertToString(it) }

Of course, once you do understand these very complicated concepts, the code above is far more readable: it clearly states WHAT the program does (filtering all values below the threshold and converting them to string) rather than HOW it does that (which nobody cares about). "readability" here is only counted from the narrow perspective of an imperative programmer who is not familiar with functional declarative data processing.

I feel the same about the "ro" examples in the OP. I don't particularly like that ro takes (mostly because Go forces its hand, I assume), like having to put everything in an explicit pipe, but I find the example far more readable than the pure Go example which combines loops, channels and WaitGroups. That's far worse than the loop example I gave in this reply, to be honest, and I really don't know why people say this example is readable. I guess you can optimize it a little, but I always found both channel and WaitGroups waitable, unreadable and error prone. They are only "readable" in narrow perverted sense that has somehow become prevalent in the Go community, where "readability" is redefined to mean: no closures, no immutable values, no generics, no type safety and certainly nothing that smells like FP.

[1] https://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox

> But can I comprehend the bigger picture? Can I understand why? Isn't the actual meat buried under piles of non-abstraction?

The way you approach this in Go (and I would argue in any other language) is by building small abstractions when and if it makes sense to do so. Not by introducing abstractions early, or in order to make a piece of code slightly easier to follow. A simple comment might help to explain tricky logic, but otherwise you shouldn't need explanations about core language features.

Abstractions are not free. They can be poorly written, leaky, abstract too much or too little, inflexible, increase overall complexity and thus cognitive load, impact performance, introduce bugs, etc.

So relying on them only when absolutely necessary is often the sensible choice.

Also, if possible, building your own bespoke abstraction is often preferable to using an external package. You can tailor it to your exact use case, without adding another dependency, which carries its own risks and problems.

This specific package seems designed to be syntax sugar over language features, which is not a good idea for future maintainers of the code that uses it. They would need to understand how this 3rd-party library works, even if the author claims it to be more readable, ergonomic, or what have you.

What makes sense depends on the agreement of the programming team.

And the smallest possible team is the programmer and their future self.

Even then the hard thing is to predict what will be better for our future selves. Maybe we will be rusty in our Go skills or maybe we will have embraced idiomatic Go, and the approach that makes sense now will require our future self to puzzle through the code.

Of course maybe we will have kept programming the same way because it still feels like the better way and our future self will be efficient. But again that's only for the smallest possible team. If the team expands, then all bets are off.