Joe Gregorio
I just checked in a port of mimeparse to Go.
The list of supported languages for mimeparse is now: Erlang, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, and Go.
The Go code size is a little larger than the original Python, 187 lines of code for Go
versus 123 for Python. Now 27 of those added lines are lines just containing
a single '}', so the difference isn't even that large.
Some of the increase is size is also probably me not producing very idiomatic Go code,
so take all these observations, and the code itself, with a grain of salt, as I'm a
Go newbie. One of the things I missed from Python is list comprehensions, and
it was one of the things that I was going to point to
as making a big difference in the length of the code. I'm not going to
claim that now, because when I look at the difference between the Python parse_mime_type
where the parsing of the mime type parameters is done, and the equivalent
in the Go ParseMimeType you can see that while the list comprehension in Python is
smaller, it is also more difficult to read, and it has a bug. I still thing there
are places where it would be useful, for example, in ParseHeader().
Python
params = dict([tuple([s.strip() for s in param.split("=")])\
for param in parts[1:] ])
Go
params := make(map[string] string);
for _, s := range parts {
subparts := strings.Split(s, "=", 2);
if len(subparts) == 2 {
params[strings.TrimSpace(subparts[0])] = strings.TrimSpace(subparts[1]);
} else {
params[strings.TrimSpace(subparts[0])] = "";
}
}
One of the surprising things about the Go code is the strong typing; that is, while Go is strongly statically typed, the code isn't cluttered with types. The type inferencing makes a tremendous amount of code noise disappear. For the most part you see types explicitly in the function declarations, but in the body they are mostly absent.
One of the other things that keeps the code size small is functions. Yes, functions, because sometimes that's all you need, without being forced to put everything in a class, if you know what I mean.
Unfortunately with the simplicity of mimeparse, I didn't get to use some of the coolest features of Go, such as channels and interfaces. Of all the things that Go introduces, interfaces are one of the biggest changes and also one of the most important. Russ Cox has a good overview of them, and delves into the implementation details in the compiler.