Team 254 Presents: Cheesy Arena

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Pat, how'd you like implementing a real web service in Go? Any things you found worked well and things that didn't?

It was an amazing experience. Go is very well suited to this sort of thing -- HTTP handling is built in and easy, network communication is a breeze, and performance is awesome (Cheesy Arena uses only 1-2% of the CPU even when running a match). Built-in unit testing and single-binary deployment are also huge plusses.

This was the first project I've used Go for so I struggled a lot with the non-object-orientedness and how to organize the code and minimize repetition. The final result isn't ideal and I need to keep working on it -- all the code is in the same "main" package, there's a lot of shared global variables, and the WebSocket handlers are more repetitive than I'd like.

Overall, though, I'd highly recommend Go for any web service work.

[billbo911]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

... The final result isn't ideal and I need to keep working on it -- all the code is in the same "main" package, there's a lot of shared global variables, and the WebSocket handlers are more repetitive than I'd like....

According to the "What programmers say vs. what they mean" translation table below, I believe the expression you are looking for is "It's a 'Complex structure'".



All kidding aside, we look forward to using Cheesy Arena at CCC next weekend. Let's hope we can use it as skillfully as it was used at CC.

Thanks again Pat, and your team, for making this and sharing it!