Lies We Tell Ourselves to Keep Using Golang
In the backend engineering community, Golang (Go) is frequently praised for its radical simplicity. From microservices at Google, Uber, and Grab to core infrastructure projects like Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform, Go seems to be everywhere. Engineers routinely swap familiar praises: “Go is dead simple to learn,” “Concurrency in Go is practically free thanks to Goroutines,” and “The Go toolchain compiles instantly into a single self-contained binary.”
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Goroutine management: errgroup, leak-proof, backpressure
Last month, one of our team’s services suddenly slowed down like a turtle. The p50 latency jumped from 50ms to 3 seconds. Upon checking Grafana, there were 120,000 goroutines running - normally, there are only 200. Someone had just pushed code and forgotten to call defer cancel() in a batch processing loop.
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Context in Go: passing data, deadline, cancel - use correctly or die of performance
When I first coded in Go, I encountered a strange production bug: after running for 3-4 days, the service suddenly consumed 8GB of RAM and caused an OOM error. I spent the entire Friday afternoon debugging and finally discovered the issue: a goroutine never ended because I forgot to pass the context to the gRPC call. Each request leaked a goroutine, and after 100K requests, the server was overwhelmed.
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