Introducing ent
The state of Go in Facebook Connectivity Tel Aviv
20 months ago, I joined Facebook Connectivity (FBC) team in Tel Aviv after ~5 years
of programming in Go and embedding it in a few companies.
I joined a team that was working on a new project and we needed to choose a language
for this mission. We compared a few languages and decided to go with Go.
Since then, Go continued to spread across other FBC projects and became a big success with around 15 Go engineers in Tel Aviv alone. New services are now written in Go.
The motivation for writing a new ORM in Go
Most of my work in my 5 years before Facebook was on infra tooling and micro-services without too much data-model work. A service that was needed to do a little amount of work with an SQL database used one of the existing open-source solutions, but one that had worked with a complicated data model was written in a different language with a robust ORM. For example, Python with SQLAlchemy.
At Facebook we like to think about our data-model in graph concepts. We've had a good experience
with this model internally.
The lack of a proper Graph-based ORM for Go, led us to write one here with the following principles:
- Schema As Code - defining types, relations and constraints should be in Go code (not struct tags), and should be validated using a CLI tool. We have good experience with a similar tool internally at Facebook.
- Statically typed and explicit API using codegen - API with
interface{}s everywhere affects developers efficiency; especially project newbies. - Queries, aggregations and graph traversals should be simple - developers don’t want to deal with raw SQL queries nor SQL terms.
- Predicates should be statically typed. No strings everywhere.
- Full support for
context.Context- This helps us to get full visibility in our traces and logs systems, and it’s important for other features like cancellation. - Storage agnostic - we tried to keep the storage layer dynamic using codegen templates, since the development initially started on Gremlin (AWS Neptune) and switched later to MySQL.
Open-sourcing ent
ent is an entity framework (ORM) for Go, built with the principles described above. ent makes it possible to define any data model or graph-structure in Go code easily; The schema configuration is verified by entc (the ent codegen) that generates an idiomatic and statically-typed API that keeps Go developers productive and happy. It supports MySQL, SQLite (mainly for testing) and Gremlin. PostgreSQL will be added soon.
We’re open-sourcing ent today, and invite you to get started → entgo.io/docs/getting-started.