Weekend long read suggestions 2019/41

Elixir

• Elixir Trickery: Cheating on Structs, And Why It Pays Off

  Deepdive into a struct in Elixir. According to Elixir’s Getting Started tutorial, Structs are extensions built on top of maps that provide compile-time checks and default values. And Michał demostrates how know that struct is a map can be useful.

• Tracking Down an ETS-related Memory Leak

  Tyler walks us through process of troubleshooting an apparenet memory-leak within Elixir app. It turned out, that you need to pay attention to data you are referencing. He was storing only two strings from a bigger binary (parsed JSON) into ETS. But those strings have not been copyed, but rather referenced. That prevented the complete parsed binaries from being garbage collected, which resulted into apparent memory leak.

• Clean and reusable test helpers with Elixir macros

  Nice introduction into macros in Elixir and how usefult they can be.

Go

• How do you *really handle errors in Go?

  An interesting Reddit thread about handing errors in Golang in the way that structured logs can be produced (e.g. keeping error metadata around).