Introducing ent

The state of Go in Facebook Connectivity Tel Aviv

20 months ago, I joined Facebook Connectivity (FBC) team in Tel Aviv after ~5 years of programming in Go and embedding it in a few companies.
I joined a team that was working on a new project and we needed to choose a language for this mission. We compared a few languages and decided to go with Go.

Since then, Go continued to spread across other FBC projects and became a big success with around 15 Go engineers in Tel Aviv alone. New services are now written in Go.

The motivation for writing a new ORM in Go

Most of my work in my 5 years before Facebook was on infra tooling and micro-services without too much data-model work. A service that was needed to do a little amount of work with an SQL database used one of the existing open-source solutions, but one that had worked with a complicated data model was written in a different language with a robust ORM. For example, Python with SQLAlchemy.

At Facebook we like to think about our data-model in graph concepts. We've had a good experience with this model internally.
The lack of a proper Graph-based ORM for Go, led us to write one here with the following principles:

• Schema As Code - defining types, relations and constraints should be in Go code (not struct tags), and should be validated using a CLI tool. We have good experience with a similar tool internally at Facebook.
• Statically typed and explicit API using codegen - API with interface{}s everywhere affects developers efficiency; especially project newbies.
• Queries, aggregations and graph traversals should be simple - developers don’t want to deal with raw SQL queries nor SQL terms.
• Predicates should be statically typed. No strings everywhere.
• Full support for context.Context - This helps us to get full visibility in our traces and logs systems, and it’s important for other features like cancellation.
• Storage agnostic - we tried to keep the storage layer dynamic using codegen templates, since the development initially started on Gremlin (AWS Neptune) and switched later to MySQL.

Open-sourcing ent

ent is an entity framework (ORM) for Go, built with the principles described above. ent makes it possible to define any data model or graph-structure in Go code easily; The schema configuration is verified by entc (the ent codegen) that generates an idiomatic and statically-typed API that keeps Go developers productive and happy. It supports MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and Gremlin-based graph databases.

We’re open-sourcing ent today, and invite you to get started → entgo.io/docs/getting-started.