Why Golang doesn’t have containers

With the development of cloud computing technology, the application of container technology is becoming more and more widespread. In terms of development languages ​​in the container field, Golang does not seem to have a clear advantage, especially in more in-depth fields such as unikernel. This article will explore the reasons why Golang does not have containers and possible solutions.

1. Why does Golang have no containers?

Although Golang is known as an efficient, safe, and easy-to-use programming language, it seems to be somewhat "overshadowed" in the container field. The reason is that the traditional static linking method adopted by Golang results in relatively large binary files and is accompanied by a huge standard library.

In the field of containers, lightweight features are essential. Because lightweight containers often need to run in a reduced operating system environment, if the image file is too large, it will occupy a lot of storage space, resulting in performance degradation.

When Golang is compiled, in addition to the main program, it will also compile all libraries used by the program. This means that the binary generated by a small program in Golang can be very large. This is more troublesome in containers because the container environment is built on the development machine. Therefore, the size of Golang and the model of the standard library will become two major issues when promoting containers.

2. Golang container solutions

Although Golang has these problems in the container field, some people in the Golang community are still trying to solve these problems to enhance Golang's containerization support. Currently, the community includes two solutions.

1. Lightweight version of Golang

Lightweight is an important feature in the container field. In Golang, a powerful container can be implemented through a simplified, lightweight version.

Using the lightweight Golang version can greatly reduce the file size generated by the program, and the support for mirroring has also been significantly improved. This enables Golang to better adapt to the needs of containers in the application field, or to uninstall some additional libraries in certain scenarios.

2. Precompiled standard library

The Golang standard library is the core of the Golang ecosystem, but due to its huge size, the generated docker image will also become very large. . One way to solve this problem is to precompile the standard library. This technology can generate the Golang standard library into the form of a static library, thereby reducing the size of the binary file.

At the same time, you can also use flags such as -ldflags=’-s -w’ in the Go compiler to further reduce the size of the generated executable program binary. The '-s' flag will strip out the symbol table in the binary, and the '-w' flag will disable DWARF debugging information.

However, for lightweight container solutions and precompiled standard library solutions, they require additional work to build an application environment.

3. Summary

Compared with other development languages, Golang’s support and application in the container field seems to be lacking. However, there are already some solutions that can give Golang better container support. The lightweight Golang version and the precompiled standard library solution are currently the two most commonly used solutions.

In the future, with the continuous development of cloud computing technology, Golang's application in the container field still has a lot of room for development. In the future, more solutions for container construction will appear in the Golang community, and we have reason to believe that Golang will be more widely used in the container field.

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