At work, I have a program that needs to load an external JSON file that is 1.4GB in size, it takes about 45 seconds for it to load and json.Unmarshal. I took that 45 second start-up time for granted. Today, I thought, what if I convert that data to protobuf? Will it speed up the start-up time? (P.S. there’s a very good benchmark of different go serialization here: https://github.com/alecthomas/go_serialization_benchmarks) So I did the switch....
Is it possible to kill a goroutine just like you could use Thread.Abort to kill a thread in Java? I opened this issue: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/50678 The conclusion is that, if we patch Golang’s src/runtime, it is possible. But in doing so, we may break some of Golang’s invariants, and make introduce bugs that are very difficult to troubleshoot. So, be very careful! I will share in this blog, how I hacked Golang to support killing goroutine, how to publish the hacked Golang as a docker image (so that it will be easy to build programs with this hacked Golang), and how to make the code compatible with non-hacked Golang (so the kill method will be a no-op and just return false)....
Monkey patching Golang code with https://github.com/bouk/monkey or go.mod replace directive. (to be continued)