In this talk I'll cover our experiences building InfluxDB, an open source distributed time series database, in Go. When we started the project in September of 2013 it wasn't totally obvious that Go would become as popular as it has or that we'd be able to make things work. I'll talk about what drove our decision to use Go, what's been really great about developing in the language, and a few of the pains that we've had along the way. I'll also dig into what performance characteristics we've seen in Go 1.4 vs. Go 1.5, which has a new garbage collector.

Native languages have a bad reputation: old fashioned, riddled with security issues, manual memory management. In the last few years, however, we've seen new native languages (Go, Swift, Rust) tackle all these problems while retaining the benefits of native languages: binaries don't depend on VMs, full control over memory layout, ahead-of-time compilation without a meddling JIT. Even C++ is joining the gang with C++ 14 and modern libraries.

In this panel we'll have users of C++, Rust, Go talk about how they picked their language of choice, what problems remain, what was impossible to do with VM-based languages and much more.

This panel is for everyone who:

• is tired of fighting their VM (GC, JIT)
• wants to catch up with the state of modern native languages
• is tired of shipping VMs and language runtimes with their binaries
• needs more control over memory layout
• wants to hear about the experience of working with native languages