More Perl to Go Conversions
As time goes by I have less and less patience for ecosystems that demand my time. Typically this is in the form of breaking changes in either a language or the modules that language uses. This morning I ported a relatively simple tool from Perl to Go to escape this kind of tax.
A few years ago I built a tool to automatically bust the CloudFlare cache for posts that have changed. Just over a year ago I got around to setting up github actions so that any push to my blog repository would automatically deploy changes.
I really appreciate being able to simply accept PRs to fix typos and that fix get deployed without me having to do anything. Generally the system is much more reliable than depending on whatever software and libraries I have installed on my laptop. Sadly, some time last week I got a failed build with this error:
purging https://blog.afoolishmanifesto.com/resume.pdf
599 Internal Exception
IO::Socket::SSL 1.42 must be installed for https support
Net::SSLeay 1.49 must be installed for https support
make: *** [Makefile:19: push] Error 1
Error: Process completed with exit code 2.
I know how to fix this, I just need to install a couple Perl modules. But for years now my line for Perl use has been “only use core modules.” Not because they are especially good, but because I don’t want to deal with any instability within the ecosystem. This was especially annoying to me because this code doesn’t directly use any non-core libraries; the TLS libraries get pulled in at runtime as a fun surprise.
I spent about 40 minutes this morning migrating the code from Perl to
Go.
This is a simple tool so compilation is fast. I run it with go run
./bin/busted-urls. I didn’t especially want to port this to Go, but I am
grateful that Go has solid JSON and HTTP (including TLS) libraries. so that
I can make this kind of tool without much effort or care.
I’m interested in hearing any other porting stories! Tell me about your migrations on mastodon at @[email protected]
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