alt Hacker NewsGolang's use of a potentially unbounded number of threads is just insane. I used to be fairly bullish on golang, but this, combined with the fact that its garbage collected, makes me feel its just unsuitable for production use.
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Why does garbage collection make it unsuitable for production use? A lot of production software is written in garbage collected languages like Java. Pretty much the entire backend for iTunes/Apple Music is written in Java, and it's not doing any kind of fancy bump allocator tricks to avoid garbage. In my mind, kind of hard to argue that Apple Music is not "production use".
There are certainly plenty of projects where garbage collection is too slow, but I don't know that they're the majority, and more people would likely prefer memory safety by default.
You can have this problem with any kind of thread -- including OS threads -- if you do an unbounded spawn loop. Go is hardly unique in this.
Goroutines are actually better AFAIK because they distribute work on a thread pool that can be much smaller than the number of active goroutines.
If my quick skim created a correct understanding, then the problem here looks more like architecture. Put simply: does the memcached client really require a new TCP connection for every lookup? I would think you would pool those connections just like you would a typical database and keep them around for approximately forever. Then they wouldn't have spammed memcache with so many connections in the first place...
(edit: ah, it looks like they do use a pool, but perhaps the pool does not have a bounded upper size, which is its own kind of fail.)