You are just a click away from Go package documentation

Akshay Bharambe — Sun, 01 Aug 2021 12:04:50 +0000

Hi Gophers!

Do you struggle to find link to official Go package documentation while looking at the repository, not anymore!

I built a handy chrome web store extension to redirect from Go source code repositories to their official documentation 📄.

Trust me, it helps everyday. Try it now!

Following repository hosts this extension. Feel free to contribute. I am open for suggestions. Give it a 🌟 if you liked it!

What I learnt while working my first open source package for Go

Akshay Bharambe — Sun, 10 May 2020 05:47:17 +0000

Recently I released a small package for Go.

akshaybharambe14 / go-jsonc

go-jsonc provides a way to work with commented json by converting it to plain json.

While building this, I came across various problems and best practices. So I just wanted to share my learnings.

Make it compatible with the standard library

This is my first priority when I build something for public. This makes your library widely compatible and reusable.

In this library, I made the decoder compatible with io.Reader. Now, I don't have to care about the source. It can be an HTTP request, a file, etc. Anything that implements io.Reader, is supported. I recommend you to read this excellent article from Mat Ryer

Reduce your API surface

In simple words, avoid using external libraries for some simple tasks. Try to use the standard library as much as you can.

In the context of this library, I intentionally avoided some functionality, like validating resulting JSON, so that the importing library can reuse its existing dependencies. Stick to the original problem instead of providing some fancy functionality.

Unit Tests are must

Writing unit tests is fun and I would say it makes your program more robust and easy to maintain. Whenever you change some logic, tests make sure your program is working as intended or not. If tests fail, then you know what to do!

This library provides 100% test coverage and this helped me allot.

You can test your program with the following command.

go test -cover

Benchmark your program

Don't just get to the conclusion without benchmarking your programs. Go tooling makes it super easy to benchmark your programs. You get the following information from benchmarks for a single function.

Number of operations performed
Time required for each operation in nanoseconds
Data processed per second
Memory required per operation
Allocations made per operation

You can benchmark your program with the following command.

go test -bench=. -benchmem

Have a look at benchmarks from this package. As you can see, using io.Reader, memory is being reused resulting in almost 500% performance increase in data processing than existing available library jsonc

goos: windows
goarch: amd64
pkg: github.com/akshaybharambe14/go-jsonc/benchmarks
BenchmarkOwnSmallJSONBytes-4              256599              4952 ns/op         353.00 MB/s           0 B/op          0 allocs/op
BenchmarkOwnSmallJSONBytesReader-4        206823              5832 ns/op         299.70 MB/s        6224 B/op          5 allocs/op
BenchmarkJSONCSmallJSONBytes-4            171474              6925 ns/op         252.41 MB/s        1792 B/op          1 allocs/op
BenchmarkOwnBigJSONBytes-4                 33517             35921 ns/op         462.26 MB/s           0 B/op          0 allocs/op
BenchmarkOwnBigJSONBytesReader-4          105244             11292 ns/op        1470.45 MB/s        6224 B/op          5 allocs/op
BenchmarkJSONCBigJSONBytes-4               19599             61422 ns/op         270.34 MB/s       18432 B/op          1 allocs/op
PASS
ok      github.com/akshaybharambe14/go-jsonc/benchmarks 26.250s

CPU profiling and memory profiling

If you think your program is not fast enough, then you can profile your programs. This really helps in finding the culprits.

In my case, I identified that my decode function was spending almost 40% time in just checking the byte can be added to resulting JSON or not. Results, I ended up gaining a 40% performance increase.

You don't need any separate tools to profile your programs. Benchmarks can be used for this also. You can generate profiles and read them with pprof.

go test -bench=. -benchmem -memprofile memprofile.out -cpuprofile profile.out

You can't avoid all allocations

I was happy with the above tweaks, but still, I was trying to avoid those 5 allocations per operations in the case of io.Reader as input (See benchmarks). But seriously stop being greedy and check it in the memory profile if those allocations are avoidable or not.

In my case, internal functions were making allocations to the heap and I can't control them. So I stopped there.

Work on feedbacks

Don't stop here and work on the feedback provided by your colleagues, friends, and community. File issues and work on them in your free time.

That's it for now. It was a nice experience and I am looking forward to contributing to some opensource go projects.

akshaybharambe14 / go-jsonc

go-jsonc provides a way to work with commented json by converting it to plain json.

Give it a try. Your feedback is highly appreciated. I will surely work on your inputs, that's what I just learned.

Happy coding!

Guide to compress GoLang binaries

Akshay Bharambe — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 18:04:26 +0000

Why we need compression

The size of binary may not be the issue in today's use cases but, we may need this in cases like running your app on raspberry pi.
By default, go includes some information in binaries that can be omitted.
Ultimately, a Go binary can be compressed to 1/4th of its actual size.

To know, how this works, you can read an excellent article here

The following table summarizes the compression with different combinations of go commands and UPX on a 64bit Windows machine. However the compression increases startup time for your app

Command	Size	Compression ratio
go build	14.2 MB (14,905,856 bytes)	100.00
go build -ldflags="-w"	11.3 MB (11,938,304 bytes)	79.57
go build -ldflags="-s"	10.5 MB (11,089,408 bytes)	73.94
go build -ldflags="-s -w"	10.5 MB (11,089,408 bytes)	73.94
go build / upx -1 -k fileName.exe	8.23 MB (8,631,808 bytes)	57.95
go build / upx -9 -k fileName.exe	6.67 MB (7,000,064 bytes)	46.97
go build -ldflags="-s" / upx -1 -k fileName.exe	4.87 MB (5,116,416 bytes)	34.29
go build -ldflags="-s" / upx -9 -k fileName.exe	3.42 MB (3,591,680 bytes)	24.08

You can refer to the following link for source code

https://github.com/akshaybharambe14/golang-examples/tree/master/binaryCompression

DEV Community: Akshay Bharambe

You are just a click away from Go package documentation

akshaybharambe14 / docgo

Now you are just a click away from official package documentation for Go repositories. DOCGO is a handy browser extension 🧱 to redirect from Go source code repositories to their official documentation 📄.

What I learnt while working my first open source package for Go

akshaybharambe14 / go-jsonc

go-jsonc provides a way to work with commented json by converting it to plain json.

Make it compatible with the standard library

Reduce your API surface

Unit Tests are must

Benchmark your program

CPU profiling and memory profiling

You can't avoid all allocations

Work on feedbacks

akshaybharambe14 / go-jsonc

go-jsonc provides a way to work with commented json by converting it to plain json.

Guide to compress GoLang binaries

Why we need compression