baseplate.go VS govips

We chose to use govips which is a cgo wrapper around the libvips image manipulation library. The majority of new development for services in our backend is written using baseplate.go. But Go is not an ideal choice for media processing as it cannot keep up with the performance of native code. The most widely used image-processing libraries like libmagick are primarily written in C or C++. Speed was a major factor in selecting libvips in order to keep latency low on CDN cache misses for images. In our tests, libvips was 3–4 times faster than libmagick on basic image processing operations. Content-aware smart cropping was implemented by porting smartcrop.js to Go. This is the only operation implemented in pure Go.

Even Reddit has python backends https://github.com/reddit/baseplate.py based on Pyramid. They also have a go one. https://github.com/reddit/baseplate.go

there's a multitude of services in reddit's architecture. as far as i can tell, they mostly using reddit's baseplate framework (which has implementations in both python and go).

FWIW, I believe Reddit has rewritten some Python into Go because of scaling issues. I don't know of any public write ups to confirm it, but at the least there's a public repo that contains their base template.

Gazette Inference Service is a baseplate.go (Reddit’s golang web services framework) thrift service whose single responsibility is serving ML inference requests to it’s clients. It is deployed with Reddit’s modern kubernetes infrastructure.

Baseplate is implemented in Python and Go, and although they share the same main functionality, smaller features differ between the two. One such feature that was previously on the Go implementation but not Python was deadline budget propagation, which passes on the remaining timeout available from the initial client request all the way through the server and any other requests that may follow. The lack of this feature in Baseplate.py meant that many resources were being wasted by servers doing unnecessary work, despite clients no longer awaiting their response due to timeout.

We chose to use govips which is a cgo wrapper around the libvips image manipulation library. The majority of new development for services in our backend is written using baseplate.go. But Go is not an ideal choice for media processing as it cannot keep up with the performance of native code. The most widely used image-processing libraries like libmagick are primarily written in C or C++. Speed was a major factor in selecting libvips in order to keep latency low on CDN cache misses for images. In our tests, libvips was 3–4 times faster than libmagick on basic image processing operations. Content-aware smart cropping was implemented by porting smartcrop.js to Go. This is the only operation implemented in pure Go.

Hi! You are willing to dive into some cgo we have a couple of feature requests :) https://github.com/davidbyttow/govips