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+GopherChina Trip Report
+1 Jul 2015
+
+Robert Griesemer
+gri@golang.org
+
+* Introduction
+
+We have known for some time that Go is more popular in China than in any other
+country.
+According to Google Trends, most [[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=golang][searches for the term “golang”]] come from The People’s Republic than anywhere else.
+[[http://herman.asia/why-is-go-popular-in-china][Others]] have speculated on
+the same observation, yet so far we have had
+[[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8872400][sparse concrete information]]
+about the phenomenon.
+
+The first Go conference in China, [[http://gopherchina.org/][GopherChina]],
+seemed like an excellent opportunity to explore the situation by putting some
+Western Gopher feet on Chinese ground. An actual invitation made it real and I
+decided to accept and give a presentation about gofmt’s impact on software
+development.
+
+.image gopherchina/image04.jpg
+
+_Hello,_Shanghai!_
+
+The conference took place over an April weekend in Shanghai, in the
+[[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Puruan+Bldg,+Pudong,+Shanghai,+China][Puruan Building]]
+of the Shanghai Pudong Software Park, easily reachable by subway within an hour
+or less from Shanghai’s more central parts.
+Modelled after [[http://www.gophercon.com][GopherCon]], the conference was
+single-track, with all talks presented in a conference room that fit about 400
+attendees.
+It was organized by volunteers, lead by [[https://github.com/astaxie][Asta Xie]],
+and with robust sponsorship from major industry names. According to the
+organizers, many more people were hoping to attend than could be accommodated
+due to space constraints.
+
+.image gopherchina/image01.jpg
+
+_The_welcoming_committee_with_Asta_Xie_(2nd_from_left),_the_primary_organizer._
+
+Each attendee received a bag filled with the obligatory GopherChina t-shirt,
+various sponsor-related informational brochures, stickers, and the occasional
+stuffed “something” (no fluffy Gophers, though). At least one 3rd party vendor
+was advertising technical books, including several original (not translated
+from English) Go books.
+
+.image gopherchina/image05.jpg
+
+_Go_books!_
+
+On first impression, the average attendee seemed pretty young, which made for
+an enthusiastic crowd, and the event appeared well run.
+
+With the exception of my talk, all presentations were given in Mandarin and
+thus were incomprehensible to me. Asta Xie, the primary organizer, assisted
+with a few simultaneous translations whispered into my ear, and the occasional
+English slide provided additional clues: “69GB” stands out even without any
+Mandarin knowledge (more on that below). Consequently, I ended up listening to
+a handful of presentations only, and instead spent much of my time talking with
+attendees outside the main conference room. Yet judging from the slides, the
+quality of most presentations seemed high, comparable with our experience at
+GopherCon in Denver last year. Each talk got a one hour time slot which allowed
+for plenty of technical detail, and many (dozens) of questions from an
+enthusiastic audience.
+
+As expected, many of the presentations were about web services, backends for
+mobile applications, and so on. Some of the systems appear to be huge by any
+measure.
+For instance, a talk by [[http://gopherchina.org/user/zhouyang][Yang Zhou]]
+described a large-scale internal messaging system, used by
+[[http://www.360.cn/][Qihoo 360]], a major Chinese software firm, all written
+in Go. The presentation discussed how his team managed to reduce an original
+heap size of 69GB (!) and the resulting long GC pauses of 3-6s to more
+manageable numbers, and how they run millions of goroutines per machine, on a
+fleet of thousands of machines. A future guest blog post is planned describing
+this system in more detail.
+
+.image gopherchina/image03.jpg
+
+_Packed_conference_room_on_Saturday._
+
+In another presentation, [[http://gopherchina.org/user/guofeng][Feng Guo]] from
+[[https://www.daocloud.io/][DaoCloud]] talked about how they use Go in their
+company for what they call the “continuous delivery” of applications. DaoCloud
+takes care of automatically moving software hosted on GitHub (and Chinese
+equivalents) to the cloud. A software developer simply pushes a new version on
+GitHub and DaoCloud takes care of the rest: running tests,
+[[https://www.docker.com/][Dockerizing]] it, and shipping it using your
+preferred cloud service provider.
+
+Several speakers were from well-recognized major software firms (I showed the
+conference program to non-technical people and they easily recognized several
+of the firm’s names). Much more so than in the US, it seems Go is not just
+hugely popular with newcomers and startups, but has very much found its way
+into larger organizations and is employed at a scale that we are only starting
+to see elsewhere.
+
+Not being an expert in web services myself, in my presentation I veered off the
+general conference theme a bit by talking about
+[[https://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/][gofmt]] and how its widespread use has started
+to shape expectations not just for Go but other languages as well.
+I presented in English but had my slides translated to Mandarin beforehand. Due
+to the significant language barrier I wasn’t expecting too many questions on my
+talk itself.
+Instead I decided the keep it short and leave plenty of time for general
+questions on Go, which the audience appreciated.
+
+.image gopherchina/image06.jpg
+
+_No_social_event_in_China_is_complete_without_fantastic_food._
+
+A couple of days after the conference I visited the 4-year-old startup company
+[[http://www.qiniu.com/][Qiniu]] (“Seven Bulls”), at the invitation of its
+[[http://gopherchina.org/user/xushiwei][CEO]] Wei Hsu, facilitated and
+translated with the help of Asta Xie. Qiniu is a cloud-based storage provider
+for mobile applications; Wei Hsu presented at the conference and also happens
+to be the author of one of the first Chinese books on Go (the leftmost one in
+the picture above).
+
+.image gopherchina/image02.jpg
+.image gopherchina/image00.jpg
+
+_Qiniu_lobby,_engineering._
+
+Qiniu is an extremely successful all-Go shop, with about 160 employees, serving
+over 150,000 companies and developers, storing over 50 Billion files, and
+growing by over 500 Million files per day. When asked about the reasons for
+Go’s success in China, Wei Hsu is quick to answer: PHP is extremely popular in
+China, but relatively slow and not well-suited for large systems. Like in the
+US, universities teach C++ and Java as primary languages, but for many
+applications C++ is too complex a tool and Java too bulky. In his opinion, Go
+now plays the role that traditionally belonged to PHP, but Go runs much faster,
+is type safe, and scales more easily. He loves the fact that Go is simple and
+applications are easy to deploy. He thought the language to be “perfect” for
+them and his primary request was for a recommended or even standardized package
+to easily access database systems. He did mention that they had GC problems in
+the past but were able to work around them. Hopefully our upcoming 1.5 release
+will address this. For Qiniu, Go appeared just at the right time and the right
+(open source) place.
+
+According to Asta Xie, Qiniu is just one of many Go shops in the PRC. Large
+companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and Weibo, are now all using Go in
+one form or another. He pointed out that while Shanghai and neighboring cities
+like [[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Suzhou,+Jiangsu,+China][Suzhou]] are
+high-tech centres, even more software developers are found in the Beijing area.
+For 2016,  Asta hopes to organize a larger (1000, perhaps 1500 people)
+successor conference in Beijing.
+
+It appears that we have found the Go users in China: They are everywhere!
+
+_Some_of_the_GopherChina_materials,_including_videos,_are_now_available_alongside_Go_coursework_on_a_ [[http://www.imooc.com/view/407][_3rd_party_site_]].
+
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