Ergo: a framework for creating microservices using technologies and design patterns of Erlang/OTP in Golang

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#1

Quite interesting article Google brought me. Didn’t find any mentions about it here.

What do you think in general? Would you use together with Elixir or even migrate to more performant language if it would offer similar to OTP features and reliability?

P.S. I don’t have any connection to this project or its authors, I saw it in yesterday’s article selection in Google app on my phone.

Ergo

Technologies and design patterns of Erlang/OTP have been proven over the years. Now in Golang. Up to x5 times faster than original Erlang/OTP in terms of network messaging. The easiest way to create an OTP-designed application in Golang.

Purpose

The goal of this project is to leverage Erlang/OTP experience with Golang performance. Ergo Framework implements DIST protocol, ETF data format and OTP design patterns gen.Server, gen.Supervisor, gen.Application which makes you able to create distributed, high performance and reliable microservice solutions having native integration with Erlang infrastructure.

Features

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  • Support Erlang 24 (including Alias and Remote Spawn features)
  • Spawn Erlang-like processes
  • Register/unregister processes with simple atom
  • gen.Server behavior support (with atomic state)
  • gen.Supervisor behavior support with all known restart strategies support
    • One For One
    • One For All
    • Rest For One
    • Simple One For One
  • gen.Application behavior support with all known starting types support
    • Permanent
    • Temporary
    • Transient
  • gen.Stage behavior support (originated from Elixir’s GenStage). This is abstraction built on top of gen.Server to provide a simple way to create a distributed Producer/Consumer architecture, while automatically managing the concept of backpressure. This implementation is fully compatible with Elixir’s GenStage. Example is here examples/genstage or just run go run ./examples/genstage to see it in action
  • gen.Saga behavior support. It implements Saga design pattern - a sequence of transactions that updates each service state and publishes the result (or cancels the transaction or triggers the next transaction step). gen.Saga also provides a feature of interim results (can be used as transaction progress or as a part of pipeline processing), time deadline (to limit transaction lifespan), two-phase commit (to make distributed transaction atomic). Here is example examples/gensaga.
  • Connect to (accept connection from) any Erlang node within a cluster
  • Making sync request ServerProcess.Call, async - ServerProcess.Cast or Process.Send in fashion of gen_server:call, gen_server:cast, erlang:send accordingly
  • Monitor processes/nodes
    • local → local
    • local → remote
    • remote → local
  • Link processes
    • local <-> local
    • local <-> remote
    • remote <-> local
  • RPC callbacks support
  • embedded EPMD (in order to get rid of erlang’ dependencies)
  • Experimental observer support
  • Unmarshalling terms into the struct using etf.TermIntoStruct, etf.TermProplistIntoStruct or to the string using etf.TermToString
  • Custom marshaling/unmarshaling via Marshal and Unmarshal interfaces
  • Encryption (TLS 1.3) support (including autogenerating self-signed certificates)
  • Tested and confirmed support Windows, Darwin (MacOS), Linux, FreeBSD.
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#2

Amazing that OTP paradigm is winning new hearts and minds!
I think it also depends on the taste in programming language - which one lets you express your idea with more ease.
Elixir is also a functional language with features and design like patter matching, tail recursion and focus on simple data types (lists/tuples/maps). I personally would be missing these features if I switched to Golang.
Do I understand that ergo provides some sort of binary compatibility so you could have a cluster of elixir and golang nodes? That’s very cool.

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#3

Do I understand that ergo provides some sort of binary compatibility so you could have a cluster of elixir and golang nodes? That’s very cool.

Yes, from what I understood it does, I’m also quite excited about it.

From my own perspective I don’t think this project is able totally replace Beam VM, at least before golang gets immutability and total process (goroutines) isolation (it doesn’t do both, right? not quite sure about the last part, but it shouldn’t). But it would help to add “computation” nodes which can handle heavy calculations and the main part would do the rest.

#4

Clustering is based on TCP and the erlang term format. OTP has support for C backed nodes in erlang clusters: Erlang -- Erl_Interface User's Guide

2 Likes
#5

Thanks for the mention my project here :+1:

I’ve released the next version of Ergo Framework 2.1.0 with cool features (compression, proxy, etc…) . Full changelog is here GitHub - ergo-services/ergo: an actor based Framework for creating microservices using technologies and design patterns of Erlang/OTP in Golang

Happy coding :v:

8 Likes
#6

In a similar spirit of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I came across GitHub - lunatic-solutions/lunatic: Lunatic is an Erlang-inspired runtime for WebAssembly the other day. Both look interesting (and impressively ambitious). Joe Armstrong et al were clearly on to something.

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