This is a cross-post of a post of a post I made to the Benchling Engineering blog. See the original post.

The world of frontend development evolves so quickly that sometimes it feels impossible to keep up. Even worse, what do you do with your existing code when technologies shift? Innovations in languages, libraries, and practices are great, but they’re only useful if they can be used in practice. To enable new technologies, we need good modernization tools to aid in the transition process.

At Benchling, we chose CoffeeScript in 2013, but about a year and a half ago, we recognized that the language was losing steam. The community and the tools were all moving to JavaScript, and with ES2015, JavaScript was getting much, much better. We made a decision: New code will be in JavaScript, and for now, the 200,000 lines of CoffeeScript will stay as-is. We’ll convert code over to JS as we find time for it. We wanted to be entirely on JavaScript, of course, but converting that much code seemed like a gigantic task.

I took that as a challenge, and a year and a half later, I’m happy to say that that gigantic task is now complete. We’re finally at zero lines of CoffeeScript, all with minimal disruption to feature work. At the time, there weren’t good tools for such a big conversion, so I had to help build them. I started contributing to the decaffeinate open source project, became the primary maintainer, and pushed it to completion. This post is about that long journey, and now that a tool like decaffeinate exists, it probably won’t take as long for you. 😄

Why switch to JavaScript?

At Benchling, we build tools to help biologists coordinate experiments, analyze and work with DNA, and more, and one of our strengths is our modern platform. We need to build and iterate quickly, so it’s important that we always have access to the latest and greatest tools. (We’re also hiring!)

We started with CoffeeScript in 2013, and that was the right choice at the time. The JavaScript language was at a standstill, and CoffeeScript overhauled it by introducing arrow functions, classes, destructuring, string templates, array spread, and lots of other cool features. It certainly had problems, like lack of standardization, surprises around variable scoping, and difficulty writing tooling, but it was the best there was.

Over the next few years, JavaScript made a comeback. Inspired largely by many of the CoffeeScript features, the JavaScript committee released the ES2015 spec (a.k.a. ES6) that moved the language up to parity with CoffeeScript in some cases and beyond in other cases, and with Babel, it was possible to use modern JavaScript in any browser without waiting. The community became focused on JavaScript, so the tools got better. ESLint now has hundreds of rules and many competing popular default configurations, Prettier is a whole new class of formatter, and TypeScript and Flow allow advanced type checking while staying true to JS. Switching programming languages is never an easy choice, but it seemed like JavaScript was a safer long-term bet, and it’s easy to use the two side-by-side, so writing new code in JavaScript seemed reasonable.

Having a split codebase is possible, but it ended up hurting productivity when working with older code. Switching back and forth between two languages is a pain, and two frontend languages meant more for new hires to learn and more trivial style rules to keep track of. And, of course, our new tools like ESLint couldn’t help when modifying old CoffeeScript code, where they probably would be most useful. A unified JavaScript codebase seemed like the right end goal.

First idea: convert the code by hand

One day in June 2016, a coworker decided to be ambitious: he was working with a complex 500-line React component, GuideGroupTable.coffee, and he was going to port it to ES6 first to make it easier to work with. Line-by-line, he carefully reworked the syntax and some of the logic until finally, GuideGroupTable.js was ready to try out. It broke the first time, and the second, but after fixing some little mistakes, things seemed to work, and he wrote some additional tests to gain more confidence in the conversion.

Even with tests, and even with a thorough code review, making such a big change to complex code is risky, and it ended up introducing two bugs. In all, converting the code, getting it reviewed, and fixing the resulting bugs took about two engineer-days total. But at least there was a shiny new modern-looking GuideGroupTable.js. One file down, about 1000 more to go.

Math quiz: If every 500 lines of CoffeeScript converted takes 2 days and introduces 2 bugs, how many days and bugs is it for 200,000 lines?

Answer: 800 days (or 6,400 hours), 800 bugs.

Spending over 3 engineer-years on switching programming languages would be a disastrous waste of time, especially for a startup; that’s time that could be spent working on real problems that scientists are facing. At the end of the day, cancer doesn’t care what programming language we use, and if sticking with CoffeeScript is the pragmatic choice, that’s what we’ll do.

Maybe this was just a particularly difficult case and other code would be easier. Even if these estimates are too high by a factor of ten, 640 hours and 80 bugs is still way too much to ask. If we’re going to move off of CoffeeScript at all, there needs to be a better way.

Second idea: the CoffeeScript compiler

In a certain sense, automatically converting CoffeeScript to JavaScript is trivial: just run it through the CoffeeScript compiler. The newest versions of CoffeeScript (which didn’t exist at the time) produce pretty good code, but there’s still quite a bit to be desired:

• It reformats your code: it switches to two-space indentation, it deletes blank lines, it sometimes expands one-liners to multiple lines, and it sometimes joins multi-line expressions into one long line.
• It always uses var and declares all variables at the top of the file/function.
• It sometimes generates awkward code for the sake of strict correctness, like using void 0 instead of undefined or [].indexOf.call(array, x) instead of array.indexOf(x). If you’re still on CoffeeScript version 1, you’ll see more issues: that compiler also removes inline comments and doesn’t attempt to use newer JS features like classes and destructuring.

In short, the CoffeeScript compiler is a good compiler, but not a great codebase conversion tool, so we decided to look for other approaches.

Third idea: decaffeinate

We weren’t the only company with this problem, and through some discussions, I heard about a tool called decaffeinate that tried to solve this problem: it took in CoffeeScript and produced modern JavaScript, at least as much as it could. Unlike the CoffeeScript compiler, it keeps your formatting and tries to use modern syntax and patterns.

I installed it and tried it out on our codebase. Out of 1200 files, it failed on about 600 of them. On the plus side, it successfully converted half of the files.

It was promising, but it certainly wasn’t done. Lots of features were explicitly not supported: ?., for own loops, loops used as expressions, complex class bodies, and more. And most of the time, you’d get a confusing error like “Unexpected token” with no further context.

I hadn’t made many GitHub contributions before, but it seemed like a reasonable place to start. I filed some bugs, improved some error reporting, learned the code better and better, and eventually, I was a regular contributor. For the last year or so, I’ve been the primary maintainer.

If you want to try it out, the REPL is a nice interactive environment where you can type or paste some CoffeeScript and see what decaffeinate produces.

How does decaffeinate work?

Is decaffeinate a compiler? Maybe it’s a transpiler? (Is that really any different?) I’d say it’s neither; it’s something else entirely. It’s similar to a compiler, but it has different goals and, in this case, a different architecture.

The CoffeeScript compiler approach: code → AST → code

First, let’s see how the CoffeeScript compiler handles some example code:

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if isHappy then cheer()

First, it splits the code up into tokens: IF, IDENTIFIER: isHappy, THEN, IDENTIFIER: cheer, CALL_START, CALL_END, TERMINATOR.

Then, it parses the tokens into an abstract syntax tree (AST):

Each AST node then knows how to format itself into JavaScript code:

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if (isHappy) {
  cheer();
}

Notice that the one-liner was expanded to multiple lines. CoffeeScript doesn’t take any formatting into account when producing output, since it throws away the code and only uses the AST when generating JavaScript.

The decaffeinate approach: targeted replacement

Many of the details in decaffeinate are similar, but it focuses on editing your code, not rewriting it. Rather than producing new code, it uses the AST and tokens to generate a list of changes to the code. In this case, decaffeinate uses the token positions to recognize that the if statement is a one-liner, then makes these changes:

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Insert "(" before "isHappy"
Insert ")" after "isHappy"
Delete "then "
Insert "{ " before "cheer()"
Insert ";" after "cheer()"
Insert " }" after "cheer()"

Those operations are then applied to the original code:

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if (isHappy) { cheer(); }

Your code only changes where it needs to, and in most cases, the shape of the code is the same as before.

Is this the right architecture? Frankly, it’s unclear, and projects like Prettier have made a compelling argument that codebases should simply have zero manual formatting anyway. But it’s the architecture decaffeinate went with.

Is it even possible?

When building an automatic translation from one programming language to another, you run into an uncomfortable possibility: the problem you’re solving might be impossible.

Let’s take an example. Ideally, CoffeeScript classes can always be converted to JavaScript classes. Here’s one CoffeeScript class that uses a feature you may not have seen:

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class Giraffe
  if ENABLE_LOUD_GIRAFFES
    roar: ->
      return 'ROAR!!!'
  else
    roar: ->
      return 'roar...'

Yep, you can do that in CoffeeScript! Not only can you conditionally define methods, you can run arbitrary code at class setup time. JS classes can only consist of plain methods (for now), so there simply isn’t a way to do this. You can try, and you’ll get a syntax error:

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class Giraffe {
  if (ENABLE_LOUD_GIRAFFES) {
    roar() {  // <- Unexpected token, expected ; (3:11)
      return 'ROAR!!!';
    }
  } else {
    roar() {
      return 'roar...';
    }
  }
}

If you’re moving this code over manually, you’d think to yourself “I guess that trick doesn’t work in JavaScript, so I’ll rethink the code”, but that’s not possible with an automated tool.

So how should a tool like decaffeinate approach this? There are a few options:

1. Fall back to the CoffeeScript implementation. That’s not so unreasonable, but ideally CS classes would always become JS classes. It’s also not as easy as it sounds, given the different architectures.
2. Throw an error, saying that this syntax isn’t supported. Anyone wanting to run decaffeinate on code like this needs to dumb down the code first.
3. Find some trick to make it work anyway.

#3 is where decaffeinate really shines: there are lots of little tricks to make the code look as good as possible while still being correct.

Case study: converting array comprehensions

Let’s take a look at some CoffeeScript code:

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colors = (marker.color for marker in getMarkers())

Looks pretty clean (although you’ll get an unpleasant surprise if you forget the parens). JavaScript doesn’t have array comprehensions, so we’ll need to find some alternative.

Here’s how the CoffeeScript compiler handles it:

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var colors, marker;
colors = (function() {
  var i, len, ref, results;
  ref = getMarkers();
  results = [];
  for (i = 0, len = ref.length; i < len; i++) {
    marker = ref[i];
    results.push(marker.color);
  }
  return results;
})();

Yuck. It works, but it certainly wouldn’t pass code review. Here’s what we really want:

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const colors = getMarkers().map((marker) => marker.color);

Looks pretty clean, and not too different from the original code. But is it correct? It certainly looks right, but would you be willing to run this transformation (a for b in c to c.map(b => a)) on hundreds of thousands of lines of code? As it turns out, it’s not correct. If you want, you can stop reading and think about what goes wrong.

I implemented this transformation, ran decaffeinate on a few thousand lines of code from work, did lots of testing, including existing automated tests, and it still ended up causing a crash in production.

Here’s the old CoffeeScript:

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cids = ($(row).attr('data-id') for row in $el.find('.alignment-row'))

And here’s the new JavaScript:

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let cids = $el.find('.alignment-row').map((row) => $(row).attr('data-id'));

The fundamental problem here is that you might not be working with an array. In this case, it was a jQuery collection, where map exists, but doesn’t produce an array.

This problem is all over the place in CoffeeScript: every time you iterate through something in CoffeeScript, it needs to be array-like. That means you need arr.length, arr[0], arr[1], etc. When ES2015 came around, they decided to do things differently: they created the iterable protocol. Any object that wants to be iterable can expose a Symbol.iterator function that describes how to iterate through the object. That’s what JavaScript uses for iteration when you use for (const rhino of rhinos) or children = [...children, baby]. Arrays are both array-like and iterable, but plenty of JS objects are array-like but not iterable, and even more objects don’t have map (or have a map that works differently). Strings, jQuery collections, and FileList (but only in Safari) can all cause problems here.

Fortunately, there’s a simple built-in function that converts array-like objects to true arrays: Array.from. To systematically avoid this problem, we can throw in Array.from anywhere we iterate over anything, and this is what decaffeinate does.

This is one of the toughest design questions of decaffeinate: how important is correctness really? If a bug only comes up every few thousand lines of code, do we really want to defensively add Array.from on all iteration operators?

After a lot of thinking, I decided that yes, decaffeinate should be completely correct on all reasonable code. There’s a judgement call about what is “reasonable”, but decaffeinate needs to be trustworthy. decaffeinate’s goal is to speed up the conversion from CoffeeScript to JS, and if you need to extensively manually test your code after decaffeinate, it will take much, much longer. decaffeinate needs to be as stable as any compiler.

If you use decaffeinate, you’ll probably see Array.from all over the place. You can disable it with the --loose option, but I’d recommend instead looking through the resulting code and only removing Array.from when you’re confident that the object you’re working with is already an array.

Reaching super-stability

Between July and December 2016, decaffeinate slowly got more and more stable when run on the Benchling code. 500 files failing, then 350, then 200, then 50, then 10, then 5, then 0. After some cheers and excitement, I ran the tests for the newly-decaffeinated codebase, and they crashed immediately. More work to do, I guess. I fixed a bug, I fixed another bug, I tracked down and fixed an ESLint bug, I upgraded Babel to work around a Babel bug, I kept on iterating, and finally it got to a point of the tests passing.

So now what? decaffeinate seemed to work great on the code that was covered by tests, but what about the code that wasn’t covered by tests? I could write 100,000 lines of tests to try to get full code coverage, but that might take a while. I needed to find more test cases for decaffeinate, and fortunately, the internet has no shortage of CoffeeScript code. I set up a build system that would run decaffeinate on a bunch of projects, patch them to use Babel, then run all of the tests. A status board on the README was also a good motivating factor and a good way to see progress. Here were some of the results early on:

Testing out decaffeinate on codebases with a wide variety of authors and coding styles worked out great, and setting up the tests allowed me to discover the most critical bugs. There were lots and lots of bugs, but after a few months, I finally got everything working:

It’s rare that you ever get to say that a software project is complete, but I think this is one of those times. Technically, there’s still a bit more that would be useful, and I did some follow-up work to add a suggestions system and clean up usage, but decaffeinate is now in maintenance mode.

Getting to zero

With decaffeinate stable, we were finally at a point where it wasn’t crazy to run it on large swaths of code without extensive testing or review. So what do you do when you have a tool like that and 150,000 lines of CoffeeScript to convert? Somehow, converting it all at once seemed a little worrying.

Here’s the strategy we took: every Tuesday, we’d pick off a large chunk of code and run it through decaffeinate, first about 5000 lines, then larger and larger chunks, up to 20,000 lines at once. We always had a 100%-machine-automated set of commits, then two of us scanned through the converted code and made any safe cleanups we could find. That did not mean blindly removing all usages of Array.from or other decaffeinate artifacts; it meant fixing formatting, removing unused variables, renaming autogenerated variables to other names, etc. The code at the end wasn’t pristine, but it was JavaScript, and it was much better than what the CoffeeScript compiler gives.

The stability work paid off, and after repeating this process for about 10 weeks, we finally were able to get it completely to zero with very few issues. That also meant that it was possible to remove CoffeeScript from the build system, disable CoffeeLint, and delete our CoffeeScript style guide.

In a sense, the job still isn’t done. We still have lots of files with decaffeinate artifacts and disabled lint rules that should eventually be manually cleaned up. One of our biggest auto-converted files starts with this:

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/* eslint-disable
    camelcase,
    consistent-return,
    default-case,
    func-names,
    new-cap,
    no-case-declarations,
    no-cond-assign,
    no-multi-assign,
    no-return-assign,
    no-sequences,
    no-shadow,
    no-unused-vars,
    no-use-before-define,
    no-var,
    one-var,
    prefer-const,
    prefer-rest-params,
    react/no-is-mounted,
    vars-on-top,
*/
// TODO: This file was created by bulk-decaffeinate.
// Fix any style issues and re-enable lint.
/*
 * decaffeinate suggestions:
 * DS101: Remove unnecessary use of Array.from
 * DS102: Remove unnecessary code created because of implicit returns
 * DS103: Rewrite code to no longer use __guard__
 * DS104: Avoid inline assignments
 * DS201: Simplify complex destructure assignments
 * DS202: Simplify dynamic range loops
 * DS204: Change includes calls to have a more natural evaluation order
 * DS205: Consider reworking code to avoid use of IIFEs
 * DS207: Consider shorter variations of null checks
 * Full docs: https://github.com/decaffeinate/decaffeinate/blob/master/docs/suggestions.md
 */

So it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty easy to do the remaining cleanup work as you go.

Let’s compare my original estimate with the actual cost of converting 200,000 lines of code:

Estimated cost without decaffeinate: 6,400 hours, 800 bugs.

Actual cost with decaffeinate: ~100 hours, ~5 bugs.

(Not including the work on decaffeinate, which was in my spare time. 😄).

Those 100 hours were mostly spent spot-checking and cleaning up the resulting JS, code reviewing those cleanups, manually testing the relevant features, and deploying the changes gradually to reduce risk. 2000 lines of code per hour seemed like a safe rate, but theoretically, it could have all been done at once, and if you’re in a hurry, you could probably go much faster.

What went wrong?

decaffeinate is extremely stable, but the conversion process still wasn’t without its bugs. By far, the largest source of bugs was human error. Let’s look at some code, before and after decaffeinate:

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_clearWorkspace: (itemIdsToKeep = []) ->
  @_closeAllFilesExcept (itemFileId) -> itemFileId in itemIdsToKeep
  return

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_clearWorkspace(itemIdsToKeep) {
  if (itemIdsToKeep == null) { itemIdsToKeep = []; }
  this._closeAllFilesExcept(itemFileId => Array.from(itemIdsToKeep).includes(itemFileId));
}

decaffeinate moved the default param to an if statement in order to be technically correct, wrapped itemIdsToKeep in Array.from, and changed the in operator to the includes method. The if statement and the Array.from could both use cleanup, and in this case we played it safe and only removed the Array.from, since it clearly seemed like an array:

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_clearWorkspace(itemIdsToKeep) {
  if (itemIdsToKeep == null) { itemIdsToKeep = []; }
  this._closeAllFilesExcept(itemFileId => itemIdsToKeep.includes(itemFileId));
}

As it turns out, itemIdsToKeep was not always an array. Purely by mistake, it could sometimes be a DOM event instead. Both CoffeeScript and Array.from silently treat it as the empty array in that case, but removing Array.from exposed the crash.

This is an example of a theme that occurred a number of times: decaffeinate tends to break on code that is already buggy.

Let’s look at another example. Here’s some CoffeeScript before and JavaScript after:

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parse: (response) ->
  response.features = new selectables.Collection(response.features)
  return response

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parse(response) {
  response.features = new selectables.Collection(response.features);
  return response;
}

Seems pretty simple, right? What could go wrong?

As it turns out, the problem wasn’t so much a conversion error as an unexpected consequence in switching compilers: switching from CoffeeScript to Babel enables strict mode. Without strict mode, assigning to a non-writable property is a no-op, and in strict mode it crashes. In this case, response was supposed to be an object, but instead was sometimes the empty string, which meant that the assignment simply did nothing. This was just a bug, but it was a benign bug before and switching to Babel made it a crashing bug.

How can you avoid running into these same problems? Some ideas:

• Try to defer extensive manual cleanups until you’re working heavily with the code and are comfortable testing all of its edge cases. Over and over, we found that a cleanup that seemed safe actually had subtle flaws, and often times it was best to just go with the decaffeinate output.
• You may want to move to strict mode separately from moving to JS. One way to do this is with the babel-plugin-transform-remove-strict-mode Babel plugin. That will keep you on the lookout for the types of errors that arise in strict mode.

Other things to know before using decaffeinate

Here are some more things to keep in mind:

• The hardest problem that decaffeinate had to solve is handling this before super in constructors, which is allowed in CS but not in JS. There’s a hack to trick Babel and TypeScript into allowing it, but it’s an ugly hack that you should remove ASAP after running decaffeinate.

• To help run decaffeinate along with other tools, I wrote a tool called bulk-decaffeinate that runs decaffeinate, several jscodeshift transforms (e.g. converting code to JSX), eslint --fix and several other steps. You’ll probably want to either use that tool or one you write yourself, since decaffeinate is more of a building block.

• There have been some great previous blog posts on decaffeinate: Converting a large React Codebase from Coffeescript to ES6 and Decaffeinating a Large CoffeeScript Codebase Without Losing Sleep.

• The decaffeinate docs have some pages to help you through the process: the Conversion Guide has some practical advice on running decaffeinate on a big codebase, and the Cleanup Suggestions page lists most of the subtleties you’ll see in the converted code. You can also drop in on Gitter to ask questions!

Every project and team is different, though, so regardless of how you approach it, you’ll likely need some real effort and care. But hopefully, once the conversion strategy, the configuration, and any other details are figured out, the gruntwork will all be safely handled by decaffeinate!

Migration tools let you focus on what’s important

Programming is full of tradeoffs, and a common pitfall is to focus too much on your code when you should be focusing on the real problem that you’re solving. Whether it’s formatting, variable names, code structure, or even what programming language to use, none of it matters if the product doesn’t actually help people. Big code migrations can sometimes feel necessary and benefit in the long run, but they can also be a big distraction and a massive time sink. It’s often an awkward tradeoff, but with solid migration tools like decaffeinate, you can get the best of both worlds: you can benefit from the latest tools and practices while still focusing your time and brainpower on solving real problems and helping people.

I’ve been learning the Go programming language in my favorite way: by writing a Go interpreter in Go. The source code so far is on GitHub, but the point of this post is to tell the story of a particularly interesting challenge I ran into: programmatically accessing unexported (a.k.a. private) functions in other packages. In the process of figuring this out, I learned about lots of escape hatches and limitations of Go. The result of the adventure is a little library I made and put on GitHub called go-forceexport. If you want a TLDR, you can just read the source code, but hopefully you’ll find the adventure interesting as well!

My perspective in this post is someone who has plenty of experience with programming both low-level and high-level languages, but is new to the Go language and curious about its internals and how it compares to other languages. In both the exploration process and the process of writing this post, I learned quite a bit about the right way to think about Go. Hopefully by reading this you’ll be able to learn some of those lessons and also share the same curiosity.

What are unexported functions are and why would I want to call one?

In Go, capitalization matters, and determines whether a name can be accessed from the outside world. For example:

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func thisFunctionIsUnexported() {
    fmt.Println("This function starts with a 't' and can only be called from this package.")
}

func ThisFunctionIsExported() {
    fmt.Println("This function starts with a 'T' and can be called from anywhere.")
}

Other languages use the terms “private” and “public” for this distinction, but in Go, they’re called unexported and exported.

But what about when you just want to hack and explore, and you can’t easily modify the code in question? In Python, you might see a name starting with an underscore, like _this_function_is_private, meaning that it’s rude to call it from the outside world, but the runtime doesn’t try to stop you. In Java, you can generally defeat the private keyword using reflection and the setAccessible method. Neither of these are good practice in professional code, but the flexibility is nice if you’re trying to figure out what’s going wrong in a library or if you want to build a proof of concept that you’ll later make more professional.

It also can be used as a substitute when other ways of exploring aren’t available. In Python, nothing is compiled, so you can add print statements to the standard library or hack the code in other ways and it’ll just work. Java has an excellent debugging story, so you can learn a lot about library code by stepping through it in an IDE. In Go, neither of these approaches are very pleasant (as far as I’ve seen), so calling internal functions can sometimes be the next best thing.

In my specific case, the milestone I was trying to achieve was for my interpeter to be able to successfully run the time.Now function in the standard library. Let’s take a look at the relevant part of time.go:

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// Provided by package runtime.
func now() (sec int64, nsec int32)

// Now returns the current local time.
func Now() Time {
    sec, nsec := now()
    return Time{sec + unixToInternal, nsec, Local}
}

The unexported function now is implemented in assembly language and gets the time as a pair of primitive values. The exported function Now wraps that result in a struct called Time with some convenience methods on it (not shown).

So what does it take to get an interpreter to correctly evaluate time.Now? We’ll need at least these pieces:

• Parse the file into a syntax tree. Go’s parser and ast packages are a big help here.
• Transform the struct definition for Time (defined elsewhere in the file) and its methods into some representation known to the interpreter.
• Implement multiple assignment, struct creation, and the other operations used in Now.
• While evaluating line 6, my interpreter should notice that now doesn’t have a Go implementation, and prefer to just call the real time.now. (There are other possible approaches, but this one seemed reasonable.)

To prove that that last bullet point was possible, I wanted to write a quick dummy program that just called time.now (even if it needed some hacky mechanism), but this ended up being a lot harder than I was expecting. Most discussions on the internet basically said “don’t do that”, but I decided that I wouldn’t give up so easily.

A related goal is that I wanted a way to take a string name of a function and get that function back. It’s worth noting that it’s totally unclear if I should expect this problem to be solvable in the first place. In C, there’s no way to do it, in Java it’s doable, and in higher-level scripting languages it’s typically pretty easy. Go seems to be somewhere between C and Java in terms of the reflection capabilities that I expect, so I might be attempting something that simply can’t be done.

Attempt #1: reflect

Reflection is the answer in Java, so maybe in Go it’s the same way? Sure enough, Go has a great reflect package that works in a lot of cases, and even lets you read unexported struct fields by name, but it doesn’t seem to have any way to provide access to top-level functions (exported or unexported).

In a language like Python, an expression like time.now would take the time object and pull off a field called now. So you might hope to do something like this:

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reflect.ValueOf(time).MethodByName("now").Call([]reflect.Value{})

But alas, in Go, time.now is resolved at compile time, and time isn’t its own object that can be accessed like that. So it seems like reflect doesn’t provide an easy answer here.

Attempt #2: runtime

While I was exploring, I noticed runtime.FuncForPC as a way to programmatically get the name of any function:

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runtime.FuncForPC(reflect.ValueOf(f).Pointer()).Name()

I dug into the implementation, and sure enough, the Go runtime package keeps a table of all functions and their names, provided by the linker. Relevant snippets from symtab.go:

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var firstmoduledata moduledata  // linker symbol

func findmoduledatap(pc uintptr) *moduledata {
    for datap := &firstmoduledata; datap != nil; datap = datap.next {
        ...
    }
}

func findfunc(pc uintptr) *_func {
    datap := findmoduledatap(pc)
    ...
}

func FuncForPC(pc uintptr) *Func {
    return (*Func)(unsafe.Pointer(findfunc(pc)))
}

The moduledata struct isn’t particularly friendly, but it looks like if I could access it, then I should, theoretically, be able to loop through it to find a pointer to a function with name "time.now". With a function pointer, it should hopefully be possible to find a way to call it.

Unfortunately, we’re at the same place we started. I can’t access firstmoduledata, findmoduledatap, or findfunc for the same reason that I can’t access time.now. I looked through the package to find some place where maybe it leaks a useful pointer, but I couldn’t find anything. Drat.

If I was desperate, I might attempt to guess function pointers and call FuncForPC until I find one with that right name. But that seemed like a recipe for disaster, so I decided to look at other approaches.

Attempt #3: jump down to assembly language

An escape hatch that should definitely work is to just write my code in assembly language. It should be possible to make an assembly function that calls time.now then connect that function to a Go function. I cloned the Go source code and took a look at the Darwin AMD64 implementation of time.now itself to see what it was like:

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// func now() (sec int64, nsec int32)
TEXT time·now(SB),NOSPLIT,$0-12
    CALL    nanotime<>(SB)

    // generated code for
    //    func f(x uint64) (uint64, uint64) { return x/1000000000, x%100000000 }
    // adapted to reduce duplication
    MOVQ    AX, CX
    MOVQ    $1360296554856532783, AX
    MULQ    CX
    ADDQ    CX, DX
    RCRQ    $1, DX
    SHRQ    $29, DX
    MOVQ    DX, sec+0(FP)
    IMULQ   $1000000000, DX
    SUBQ    DX, CX
    MOVL    CX, nsec+8(FP)
    RET

Ugh. Maybe I shouldn’t be scared off by assembly, but learning the calling conventions and writing a separate wrapper for every function I wanted to call for every architecture didn’t seem pleasant. I decided to defer that idea and look at other options. Having a solution in pure Go would certainly be ideal.

Attempt #4: CGo

Another escape hatch that seemed promising is CGo, which is Go’s mechanism for directly calling C functions from Go code. Here’s a first attempt:

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/*
int time·now();
int time_now_wrapper() {
    return time·now();
}
*/
import "C"

func callTimeNow() {
    C.time_now_wrapper()
}

And here’s the error that it gives:

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Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:
  "_time·now", referenced from:
      _time_now_wrapper in foo.cgo2.o
      __cgo_b552a62968a6_Cfunc_time_now_wrapper in foo.cgo2.o
ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture x86_64
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)

Hmm, it seems to be putting an underscore before every function name, which isn’t really what I want. Maybe there’s a way around that, but dealing with multiple return values in time·now seemed like it may be another barrier, and from my reading, CGo calls have a lot of overhead because it’s doing a lot of translation work so that you can integrate with existing C code. In Java speak, it seems like it’s JNA, not JNI. So while CGo seems useful, it looks like it’s not really the solution to my problem.

Attempt #5: go:linkname

As I was digging through the standard library source code I saw something interesting in the runtime package in stubs.go:

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//go:linkname time_now time.now
func time_now() (sec int64, nsec int32)

Interesting! I had seen semantically-meaningful comments like this before (like with the CGo example, and also in other places), but I hadn’t seen this one. It looks like it’s saying “linker, please use time.now as the implementation of runtime.time_now”. Sure enough, the documentation suggests that this works, as long as your file imports unsafe. So I tried it out:

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package main

import (
    "fmt"
    _ "unsafe"
)

//go:linkname time_now time.now
func time_now() (sec int64, nsec int32)

func main() {
    sec, nsec := time_now()
    fmt.Println(sec, nsec)
}

Let’s see what happens:

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# command-line-arguments
./sandbox.go:9: missing function body for "time_now"

Drat. Isn’t the missing function body the whole point of the bodyless syntax to allow for externally-implemented functions? The spec certainly seems to think that it’s valid.

Just to see what would happen, I replaced the empty function body with a dummy implementation:

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//go:linkname time_now time.now
func time_now() (sec int64, nsec int32) {
    return 0, 0
}

Then I tried again and got this error:

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# command-line-arguments
2016/03/16 22:50:31 duplicate symbol time.now (types 1 and 1) in main and /usr/local/Cellar/go/1.6/libexec/pkg/darwin_amd64/runtime.a(sys_darwin_amd64)

When I don’t implement the function, it complains that there’s no implementation, but when I do implement it, it complains that the function is implemented twice! How frustrating!

Getting go:linkname to work

For a while, it seemed like the go:linkname approach wasn’t going to work out, but then I noticed something suspicious: the error formatting is different. It looks like the “missing function body” error is from the compiler, but the “duplicate symbol” error is from the linker. Why would the compiler care about a function body being missing, if it’s the linker’s job to make sure every symbol gets an implementation?

I decided to dig into the code for the compiler to see why it might be generating this error. Here’s what I found in pgen.go:

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func compile(fn *Node) {
    ...
    if len(fn.Nbody.Slice()) == 0 {
        if pure_go != 0 || strings.HasPrefix(fn.Func.Nname.Sym.Name, "init.") {
            Yyerror("missing function body for %q", fn.Func.Nname.Sym.Name)
            return
        }

Something is causing that inner if statement to evaluate to true, and my function doesn’t have to do with init, so it looks like pure_go is nonzero when it should be zero. Searching for pure_go shows this compiler flag:

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obj.Flagcount("complete", "compiling complete package (no C or assembly)", &pure_go)

Makes sense: if your code doesn’t have any way of defining external functions, then it’s friendlier to give an error at compile time with the location of the problem. But it looks like go:linkname was overlooked somewhere in the process. It certainly is a bit of an edge case.

After some searching, I found the culprit in build.go:

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extFiles := len(p.CgoFiles) + len(p.CFiles) + len(p.CXXFiles) + len(p.MFiles) + len(p.FFiles) + len(p.SFiles) + len(p.SysoFiles) + len(p.SwigFiles) + len(p.SwigCXXFiles)
...
if extFiles == 0 {
    gcargs = append(gcargs, "-complete")
}

So it’s just counting the number of non-Go files of each type. Since I’m only compiling with Go files, it assumes that every function needs a body. But on the plus side, the code suggests a workaround: just add a file of any of those types. I already know how to use CGo, so let’s try that:

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package main

import (
    "C"
    "fmt"
    _ "unsafe"
)

//go:linkname time_now time.now
func time_now() (sec int64, nsec int32)

func main() {
    sec, nsec := time_now()
    fmt.Println(sec, nsec)
}

And here’s what happens when you try to build that:

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main.main: call to external function main.time_now
main.main: main.time_now: not defined
main.main: undefined: main.time_now

A different error! Now the linker is complaining that the function doesn’t exist. After some experimentation, I discovered that CGo seems to cause go:linkname to be disabled for that file. If I remove the import of "C" and move it to another file, then compile the two together, then I get this output:

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1458197809 407398202

It worked! If your only goal is to get access to time.now, then this is good enough, but I’m hoping that I can go a bit further.

Looking up functions by name

Now that I know that go:linkname works, I can use it to access the firstmoduledata structure mentioned in attempt #2, which is a table containing information on all compiled functions in the binary. My hope is that I can use it to write a function that takes a function name as a string, like "time.now", and provides that function.

One problem is that runtime.firstmoduledata has type runtime.moduledata, which is an unexported type, so I can’t use it in my code. But as a total hack, I can just copy the struct to my code (or, at least, enough of it to keep the alignment correct) and pretend that my struct is the real thing. From there, I can pretty much copy the code from the runtime package to do a full scan through the list of functions until I find the right one:

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func FindFuncWithName(name string) (uintptr, error) {
    for moduleData := &Firstmoduledata; moduleData != nil; moduleData = moduleData.next {
        for _, ftab := range moduleData.ftab {
            f := (*runtime.Func)(unsafe.Pointer(&moduleData.pclntable[ftab.funcoff]))
            if f.Name() == name {
                return f.Entry(), nil
            }
        }
    }
    return 0, fmt.Errorf("Invalid function name: %s", name)
}

This seems to work! This code:

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ptr, _ := FindFuncWithName("math.Sqrt")
fmt.Printf("Found pointer 0x%x\nNormal function: %s", ptr, math.Sqrt)

prints this:

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Found pointer 0x104250
Normal function: %!s(func(float64) float64=0x104250)

So the underlying code pointer is correct! Now we just need to figure out how to use it…

Calling a function by pointer

You would think that having a function pointer would be the end of the story. In C you could just cast the pointer value to the right function type, then call it. But Go isn’t quite so generous. For one, Go normally doesn’t just let you cast between types like that, but unsafe.Pointer can be used to circumvent some safety checks. You might try just casting it to a function of the proper type:

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ptr, _ := FindFuncWithName("time.now")
timeNow := (func() (int64, int32))(unsafe.Pointer(ptr))
sec, msec := timeNow()

But that type of cast doesn’t compile; pointers can’t be cast to functions, not even using unsafe.Pointer. What if we literally cast it to a pointer to a func type?

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ptr, _ := FindFuncWithName("time.now")
timeNow := (*func() (int64, int32))(unsafe.Pointer(ptr))
sec, msec := (*timeNow)()

This compiles, but crashes at runtime:

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unexpected fault address 0xb01dfacedebac1e
fatal error: fault
[signal 0xb code=0x1 addr=0xb01dfacedebac1e pc=0x7e450]

(Look at that fault address. Apparently someone had a sense of humor.)

This isn’t a surprising outcome; functions in Go are first-class values, so their implementation is naturally more interesting than in C. When you pass around a func, you’re not just passing around a code pointer, you’re passing around a function value of some sort, and we’ll need to come up with a function value somehow if we’re to have any hope of calling our function. That function value needs to have our pointer as its underlying code pointer.

I didn’t see any obvious ways to create a function value from scratch, so I figured I’d take a different approach: take an existing function value and hack the code pointer to be the one I want. After spending some time reading how interfaces work in Go and reading the implementation of the reflect library, an approach that seemed promising was to treat the function as an interface{} (that’s Go’s equivalent of Object or void* or any: a type that includes every other type), which internally stores it as a (type, pointer) pair. Then I could pull the pointer off and work with it reliably. The reflect source code suggests that the code pointer (the pointer to the actual machine code) is the first value in a function object.

So, as a first attempt, I created a dummy function called timeNow then defined some structs to make it easy to swap out its code pointer with the real time.now code pointer:

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func timeNow() (int64, int32) {
    return 0, 0
}

type Interface struct {
    typ     unsafe.Pointer
    funcPtr *Func
}

type Func struct {
    codePtr uintptr
}

func main() {
    timeNowCodePtr, _ := FindFuncWithName("time.now")
    var timeNowInterface interface{} = timeNow
    timeNowInterfacePtr := (*Interface)(unsafe.Pointer(&timeNowInterface))
    timeNowInterfacePtr.funcPtr.codePtr = timeNowCodePtr
    sec, msec := timeNow()
    fmt.Println(sec, msec)
}

And, as you might guess, it crashed:

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unexpected fault address 0x129e80
fatal error: fault
[signal 0xa code=0x2 addr=0x129e80 pc=0x20be]

After some experimenting, I discovered that the crash was happening even without calling the function. The crash was from the line timeNowInterfacePtr.funcPtr.codePtr = timeNowCodePtr. After double-checking that the pointers were what I expect, I realized the problem: the function object I was modifying was probably in the code segment, in read-only memory. Just like how the machine code isn’t going to change, Go expects that the timeNow function value isn’t going to change at runtime. What I really needed to do was allocate a function object on the heap so that I could safely change its underlying code pointer.

So how do you dynamically allocate a function in Go? That’s what lambdas are for, right? Let’s try using one! Instead of the top-level timeNow, we can write our main function like this (the only difference is the new definition of timeNow):

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func main() {
    timeNowCodePtr, _ := FindFuncWithName("time.now")
    timeNow := func() (int64, int32) { return 0, 0 }
    var timeNowInterface interface{} = timeNow
    timeNowInterfacePtr := (*Interface)(unsafe.Pointer(&timeNowInterface))
    timeNowInterfacePtr.funcPtr.codePtr = timeNowCodePtr
    sec, msec := timeNow()
    fmt.Println(sec, msec)
}

And, again, it crashes. I’ve seen how lambdas work in other languages, so I suspected why: when a lambda takes in no outside variables, there’s no need to do an allocation each time, so a common optimization is to just have a single shared instance for simple lambdas like the one I wrote, so probably I’m again trying to write to the code segment. To work around this, we can trick the compiler into allocating a new function object each time by making the function a real closure and pulling in a variable from the outer scope (even a trivial one):

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func main() {
    timeNowCodePtr, _ := FindFuncWithName("time.now")
    var x int64 = 0
    timeNow := func() (int64, int32) { return x, 0 }
    var timeNowInterface interface{} = timeNow
    timeNowInterfacePtr := (*Interface)(unsafe.Pointer(&timeNowInterface))
    timeNowInterfacePtr.funcPtr.codePtr = timeNowCodePtr
    sec, msec := timeNow()
    fmt.Println(sec, msec)
}

And it works!

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1458245880 151691912

Turning it into a library

This code is almost useful, but wouldn’t really work as a library yet because it would require the function’s type to be hard-coded into the library. We could have the library caller pass in a function that will be modified, but that has gotchas like the read-only memory problem I ran into above.

Instead, I looked around at possible API approaches, and I got some nice inspiration from the example code for reflect.MakeFunc.

We’ll try writing a GetFunc function that can be used like this:

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var timeNow func() (int64, int32)
GetFunc(&timeNow, "time.now")
sec, msec := timeNow()

But how can GetFunc allocate a function value? Above, we used a lambda expression, but that doesn’t work if the type isn’t known until runtime.

Reflection to the rescue! We can call reflect.MakeFunc to create a function value with a particular type. In this case, we don’t really care what the implementation is because we’re going to be modifying its code pointer anyway. We end up with a reflect.Value object with a memory layout like this:

The ptr field in the reflect.Value definition is unexported, but we can use reflection on the reflect.Value to get it, then treat it as a pointer to a function object, then modify that function object’s code pointer to be what we want. The full code looks like this:

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type Func struct {
    codePtr uintptr
}

func CreateFuncForCodePtr(outFuncPtr interface{}, codePtr uintptr) {
    // outFuncPtr is a pointer to a function, and outFuncVal acts as *outFuncPtr.
    outFuncVal := reflect.ValueOf(outFuncPtr).Elem()
    newFuncVal := reflect.MakeFunc(outFuncVal.Type(), nil)
    funcValuePtr := reflect.ValueOf(newFuncVal).FieldByName("ptr").Pointer()
    funcPtr := (*Func)(unsafe.Pointer(funcValuePtr))
    funcPtr.codePtr = codePtr
    outFuncVal.Set(newFuncVal)
}

And that’s it! That function modifies its argument to be the function at codePtr. Implementing the main GetFunc API is just a matter of tying together FindFuncWithName and CreateFuncForCodePtr; details are in the source code.

Future steps and lessons learned

This API still isn’t ideal; the library user still needs to know the type in advance, and if they get it wrong, there will be horrible consequences at runtime. At the end of the day, the library isn’t significantly more useful than go:linkname, but it has some advantages, and is a good starting point for more interesting tricks. It’s potentially possible, but probably harder, to make a function that takes a string and returns a reflect.Value of the function, which would be ideal. But that’s out of scope for now. Also, the README has a number of other warnings and things to consider. For example, this approach will sometimes completely break due to function inlining.

Go is certainly in an interesting place in the space of languages. It’s dynamic enough that it’s not crazy to look up a function by name, but it’s much more performance-focused than, say, Java. The reflection capabilities are good for a systems language, but sometimes the better escape hatch is to just use unsafe.Pointer.

I’d be happy to hear any feedback or corrections in the comments below. Like I mentioned, I’m still learning all of this stuff, so I probably overlooked some things and got some terminology wrong.

In late January, I joined Khan Academy as the third member of the infrastructure team. We were just starting a big performance push, so I spent my first week or two improving our profiling tools and finding and fixing some easy slow spots (including speeding up the home page by over a second). However, every time I profiled any page, I found that the A/B testing framework, GAE/Bingo, was always one of the slowest pieces. I had some ideas on how to make some incremental improvements to speed it up, but instead, I was given a much more ambitious project: to rethink and rewrite the whole A/B testing system from scratch. I had plenty of sources of guidance and advice, but I, the new guy, was to be the sole owner and author of the new system. I was up for the task, but it was nevertheless a bit daunting.

Instead of the old strategy of keeping the A/B test data continuously up-to-date using memcache (and periodically flushing to the App Engine datastore), the new system would report events by simply logging them, and those log statements would eventually make their way into Google BigQuery through an hourly MapReduce job based on log2bq. From there, the real A/B test processing would be done completely in SQL using BigQuery queries. Since we were revamping GAE/Bingo using BigQuery, there was an obvious name: BigBingo.

Of course, that three-sentence description leaves out pretty much all of the details and makes some dangerous assumptions, but the high-level plan ended up working (with some tweaks), and I’m happy to say that all A/B tests at Khan Academy are now running under BigBingo, and the last remnants of the old GAE/Bingo system are finally being removed. In this post, I’ll talk about why a rewrite was so important, how we think about A/B testing, and some specific points of the design and architecture of BigBingo. There are some additional cool details that are probably deserving of their own blog post, so look out for those in the future.

BigBingo is fast!

Most developers at Khan Academy had a sense that the old GAE/Bingo system was slow and BigBingo would improve overall performance, but I doubt anybody expected that the improvement would be as dramatic as it was. When I finally flipped the switch to turn off GAE/Bingo, the average latency across all requests went from a little over 300ms to a little under 200ms. The most important pages had even better results, but I’ll let the pictures do the talking:

The logged-in homepage got twice as fast:

The logged-out homepage improved even more:

And our memcache went from “worryingly overloaded” to “doing great”:

Of course, making the site faster makes users happier, but it has another big benefit: cost savings. If requests can be processed twice as fast, we only need half as many App Engine instances running at a given time, so our App Engine bill drops significantly. Since Khan Academy is a nonprofit running off of donations, it’s important to us to have an efficient infrastructure so we can focus our money on improving education, not upkeep.

A/B testing at Khan Academy

A/B testing isn’t just some occasional tool at Khan Academy; it’s an important part of our engineering culture, and almost any change that we care about goes through an A/B test first, often multiple A/B tests. Right now, there are 57 A/B tests actively running, which is an average of about two active A/B tests per developer.

Unlike “traditional” A/B testing (which tends to maximize simple metrics like ad clicks, purchases, etc.), Khan Academy’s A/B testing tries to maximize student learning. That means that we try out much more advanced changes than just little UI tweaks, and measuring success is a huge challenge by itself. Here are some examples of A/B tests we do:

• We have a sophisticated system that tries to understand a student’s knowledge level and recommend the best exercises for them, and we’re always making little improvements to it. For example, we recently tried out a new system to detect when users are below their learning edge and advance them through the material more quickly. Learners under the new system progressed further, as expected, and they almost always stayed at their advanced level rather than being demoted, so we rolled out the new algorithm to all users.
• We’ve been experimenting with providing message snippets to teach our users that learning makes them not just more knowledgeable, but smarter as well. This specific motivational approach turns out to be surprisingly effective, and results in increased site usage and learning outcomes, so we’re trying out various different approaches to deliver the message in the most effective way.
• We recently switched the homepage background to one we liked better. It didn’t improve any metrics noticeably, but the A/B test verified that it didn’t hurt anything either, so we kept the new background. We run lots of little experiments like this one.

What’s different about BigBingo?

In the years since GAE/Bingo was written, the devs at KA learned a thing or two about the right way to do A/B testing and what an A/B testing framework should really do, so BigBingo diverges from GAE/Bingo in a few important ways.

The data

Here’s what you’d see when looking at the latest results of an old GAE/Bingo experiment (I added a red box to indicate the “real” data; everything else is derived from those numbers):

For clear-cut results, a few numbers will do just fine, but what do you do when the results are unexpected or completely nonsensical? In GAE/Bingo, the best thing you could do was shrug and speculate about what happened. BigBingo is different: we keep around all raw results (user-specific conversion totals) as well as the source logs and the intermediate data used to determine those results. Since it’s all in BigQuery, investigating anomalies is just a matter of doing some digging using SQL.

Keeping the raw data also makes it easy to do more advanced analysis after-the-fact:

• Instead of just using the mean number of conversions, you can look at more interesting statistics like the median, percentiles, and standard deviation, and you can ignore outliers.
• You can cross-reference A/B test participation with more sophisticated metrics, like the learning gain metric that the data science team is working on.
• You can segment your analysis based on any property you can come up with. For example, you might want to focus on only new users or only long-term users.

Some other differences

• Instead of experiments needing to pick their metrics up-front, every experiment automatically tracks every conversion (currently we have about 200 of them).
• Since KA already has a culture of A/B testing, BigBingo encourages high-quality experiments rather than focusing on making experiments as easy as possible. Every experiment has an owner assigned and a description explaining what the experiment is for and the experimental hypothesis. When an A/B test is stopped, the author is forced to fill in a conclusion. Whenever an experiment starts or finishes, a notification is sent to the entire team, so it’s easy to see what kinds of ideas everyone else is trying out and how they are going.
• BigBingo doesn’t try to be real-time, which makes the implementation much simpler. After all, up-to-the-minute A/B test results are pretty useless anyway.
• The use of memcache counters added a little bit of complexity to GAE/Bingo, which I was happy to get rid of. Not only were there complex details, running BigBingo and GAE/Bingo side-by-side revealed some additional race conditions in GAE/Bingo that weren’t known yet.

Implementation

Here’s a big-picture overview of what BigBingo looks like:

Here’s how the data flows from a user-facing request to BigQuery, then to the dashboard UI:

1. When a user enters into an A/B test, that event is recorded through a log statement. The user’s alternative is chosen through a deterministic function similar to hash(experiment_name + user_id) % num_alternatives, so no RPCs are necessary to coordinate that information.
2. When a user triggers a conversion event, it is recorded through a log statement.
3. In the hourly LogToBigQuery log export process, the raw log events (called “bingo events”) are parsed and extracted into custom BigQuery columns to be included in the normal request logs tables.
4. Every two hours, the BigBingo Summarize task runs and processes the new logs to compute the latest A/B test numbers, following a few rules:
   • If a user participates multiple times in an A/B test (which is common), only the earliest event counts.
   • A conversion event only counts for an experiment if the event happened after the user first participated in the experiment.
   • For each conversion, BigBingo computes both the total number of times the conversion was triggered and the total number of distinct users that triggered the conversion.
5. The latest data is cleaned up and copied to a “publish” dataset where it can be conveniently accessed.
6. The BigBingo dashboard, a web UI, queries these results to disply all data about a given experiment: the historical participant and conversion numbers, as well as p-values for each alternative.

Most of the details are reasonably straightforward, but I’ll dig into what’s probably the most controversial aspect of this architecture: the decision to use Google BigQuery for all storage and processing.

About BigQuery

If you’re not familiar with BigQuery, it’s a hosted Google service (really an externalization of an internal Google service called Dremel) that allows you to import giant datasets and run nearly-arbitrary SQL queries on them. BigQuery is way faster than MapReduce-based SQL engines like Hive: you’re borrowing thousands of machines from Google for just the duration of your query, and all work is done in-memory, so queries tend to finish in just a few seconds. The primary use case for BigQuery is for human users to manually dig into data, but I’ll show how it can also be used to build stateful data pipelines.

BigQuery supports nearly all SQL, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s anything close to a relational database! It has a small set of primitives that’s different from anything I’ve worked with before:

There are a few more operations that are less common, but the ones I listed are the most common ones.

Notice anything missing? No transactions? Not even a way to update or delete rows? No way to pull out a single row without paying for the whole table? How can you possibly keep track of A/B test results in such a restricted system? You’re pretty much stuck with the following rule:

To update a table, you must completely rebuild it from scratch with the new values.

That’s crazy, right?

It certainly feels like an architectural sin to rebuild all of your data over and over, but it’s not as unreasonable as you might think. BigQuery is quite cost-efficient (some rough numbers suggest that it’s more than 10x as cost-efficient as MapReduce running on App Engine), and there are lots of little tricks you can do to reduce the size of your tables. By designing the table schemas with space-efficiency in mind, I was able to reduce BigBingo’s data usage from 1TB ($5 per query) to 50GB (25 cents per query). (I’ll go over the details in a future blog post.)

There are also some huge usability advantages to using BigQuery over another batch processing system like MapReduce:

• When I was designing the queries and schema, I could try things out on real production data from within the BigQuery web UI and get results back in seconds. This meant that I could work through almost all architectural details before having to write a line of Python code.
• Once I did start to write code, I could run the full job completely from my laptop, with no need to push code out to servers in order to iterate. Whenever a query had a problem, it showed up in the “Query History” section of the BigQuery web UI, and I could easily debug it there.
• Sanity-checking the intermediate steps and hunting down problems in the data was easy because everything was immediately accessible through SQL.

Taking advantage of immutable storage

At first, having to deal with only immutable tables felt like an annoying restriction that I just had to live with, but as soon as I started thinking about making the system robust, immutability was a huge benefit. When thinking through the details, I discovered some important lessons:

• Never append to the end of a table. Keep tables immutable and queries idempotent.
• A table’s name should exactly define its contents.

This is probably best explained by looking at a simple data pipeline similar to BigBingo. First, I’ll give a straightforward but fragile approach, then show how it can be improved to take advantage of BigQuery’s architecture.

Goal: Keep track of the median number of problems solved, problems attempted, and hints taken across all users.

Every hour, the following queries are done to update the latest_medians table:

Step 1: Extract the events from the logs table into a table called new_event_totals:

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-- Results are written to new_event_totals.
SELECT
    user_id,
    -- Count the number of times the event column matches each event name.
    SUM(event = "problem_correct") AS problem_correct_count,
    SUM(event = "problem_attempt") AS problem_attempt_count,
    SUM(event = "hint_taken") AS hint_taken_count,
FROM logs_2014_07_01
WHERE time >= 1404194400 AND time < 1404198000
GROUP EACH BY user_id  -- GROUP EACH BY is just a large-scale GROUP BY

Step 2: Combine new_event_totals with the previous full_event_totals table to make the new full_event_totals table:

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-- Results are written to full_event_totals by querying to a temp table and
-- copying over full_event_totals.
SELECT
    user_id,
    SUM(problem_correct_count) AS problem_correct_count,
    SUM(problem_attempt_count) AS problem_attempt_count,
    SUM(hint_taken_count) AS hint_taken_count,
FROM new_event_totals, full_event_totals -- UNION ALL
GROUP EACH BY user_id

Step 3: Find the median of each metric, and write the result to a table called latest_medians:

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-- Results are written to latest_medians.
SELECT
    NTH(50, QUANTILES(problem_correct_count, 100)) AS median_problems_correct,
    NTH(50, QUANTILES(problem_attempt_count, 100)) AS median_problems_attempted,
    NTH(50, QUANTILES(hint_taken_count, 100)) AS median_hints_taken,
FROM full_event_totals

This code ends up working, but it doesn’t handle failure very well:

• Step 2 isn’t idempotent. For certain errors (e.g. a connection timeout when submitting the query), there’s no way to know for sure if it’s safe to retry, or if it succeeded in the first place.
• If the job fails between steps 2 and 3, it can’t be safely retried, so you need to either manually re-run step 3 or live with out-of-date results for an hour.
• If the job fails before step 2 finishes and isn’t retried before the next job runs, the event_totals table will lose all events from that hour.
• If the logs weren’t successfully loaded into BigQuery, Step 1 will think that nothing happend in that hour and will silently compute the wrong results.

To solve all of these problems, just include a timestamp in each table’s name. The background job then takes as a parameter the particular hour to process, rather than trying to figure out what the “latest” hour is. Here’s what it would do if you run it with the hour from 6:00 to 7:00 on July 1:

Step 1: Read from logs_2014_07_01_06 (the logs for 6:00 to 7:00 on July 1) and write to the table new_event_totals_logs_2014_07_01_06 (the new events for 6:00 to 7:00 on July 1).

Step 2: Read from new_event_totals_logs_2014_07_01_06 and full_event_totals_2014_07_01_06 and write to the table full_event_totals_2014_07_01_07 (the full totals as of 7:00 on July 1).

Step 3: Read from full_event_totals_2014_07_01_07 and write to the table latest_medians_2014_07_01_07 (the medians as of 7:00 on July 1).

The job takes the hour to process as a parameter, and reads the previous hour’s tables to generate that hour’s tables. Making three new tables per hour may seem wasteful, but it’s actually just as easy and cheap as the previous scheme. The main problem is that the tables will just accumulate over time, so you’ll rack up storage costs. Fortunately, BigQuery makes it easy to give an expiration time to tables, so you can set them to be automatically deleted after a week (or however long you want to keep them).

The core BigBingo job has 7 queries/tables instead of 3, but it is designed with the same strategy of keeping all old tables, and this strategy has helped tremendously and kept BigBingo’s data consistent in the face of all sorts of errors:

• Various transient errors (connection timeouts, internal BigQuery errors, etc.) have caused the whole BigBingo job to occasionally fail, and in these cases, it’s always safe to just retry the job.
• The log import process has sometimes failed and sometimes taken too long to run, and in both situations, BigBingo automatically fails (and sends an email reporting the failure) because the data it depends on isn’t ready yet.
• Whenever BigBingo fails, all future BigBingo jobs fail (rather than computing incorrect data) until the data is caught up.
• Sometimes two instances of the job end up running at the same time. Since the intermediate data is all timestamped, this doesn’t cause any problems.
• One time, when retrying a failed job, I accidentally gave an incorrect UNIX timestamp. The wrong hour was processed, but it didn’t hurt data integrity at all.
• In one or two cases, bugs have made the data actually incorrect for a while. Repairing the system is easy: just fix the bug and re-run the BigBingo job from before the bug was introduced.

The system is completely foolproof: I could replace cron with a thousand monkeys repeatedly triggering BigBingo jobs with random UNIX timestamps, and the system would still eventually make progress and remain completely consistent (although it would be a little less cost-efficient). That level of safety means I can stop worrying about maintenance and focus on more important things.

Where’s the source code?

Ideally, BigBingo would be a self-contained open-source library, but it currently has enough dependencies on internal KA infrastructure that it’s both hard to make general and would be a bit difficult to use in isolation anyway.

That said, there’s no reason I can’t share the code, so here’s a Gist with pretty much all of the code (at the time of this blog post). I put an MIT license on it, so feel free to base work off of it or use any of the self-contained pieces.

Khan Academy has lots of open-source projects, and it’s not out of the question for BigBingo to be made truly open source in the future, so let me know in the comments if you think you would use it.

That’s all for now

Curious about any more details? Think we’re doing A/B testing all wrong? Let me know in the comments!