Geek and Artist

On Service SDKs and Language Support

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve been doing a lot of work recently with various aspects of AWS on a daily basis (or close to it). My primary language these days is still Ruby, but I’ve been labouring through the excellent Seven Languages in Seven Weeks book in the hope I can broaden my horizons somewhat. I’m fairly comfortable with Python, somewhat familiar with Javascript now after playing with NodeJS and I have a cursory ability still in C/C++ and Java but it has been over 10 years since I’ve done anything significant in any of those languages.

Suffice to say, I’m far from being a polyglot, but I know my current limitations. Go has been increasingly noticeable on my radar and I am starting to familiarise myself with it, but this has led me to a small realisation. When service providers (like Amazon in this case) are providing SDK support they typically will be catering to their largest consumer base. Internally they largely use Java and that shows by their 1st class support for that language and toolchain.

Using the example of Elastic Beanstalk and the language support it provides, you can quite easily determine their current (or recent) priorities. Java came first, with .NET and PHP following. Python came about half-way through this year and Ruby was only recently added. Their general-purpose SDKs are somewhat more limiting, only supporting Java, .NET, PHP and Ruby (outside of mobile platform support). These are reasonable, if middle-of-the-road options.

Today I was attempting to run some code against the Ruby SDK, using JRuby. The amount of work it has to do is significant, parallisable and doesn’t exactly fit Ruby’s poor native support (at least in MRI) for true concurrency. I’m not going to gain anything by rewriting in PHP, cannot consider .NET and Java is just not going to be a good use of my time. I feel like there is an impedance mismatch between this set of languages and the scale of what AWS supports.

You are supposed to be scaling up to large amounts of computing and storage to best take advantage of what AWS offers. Similarly, you best make use of the platform by highly parallelising your workload. The only vaguely relevant language from this point of view is Java, but it’s just not a desirable general-purpose language for many of us, especially if we want to enjoy low-friction development as so many newer languages provide.

To be more specific – languages like Go, Erlang (or perhaps more relevant, Elixir), Scala etc offer fantastic concurrency and more attractive development experiences but these are not going to be supported by the official SDKs. It makes perfect sense from the point of view of the size of the developer base, but from the point of view of picking the right tool for the job it doesn’t. Perhaps in a few years this paradigm of highly parallel computing will have gained momentum enough that these languages move to the mainstream (ok, Heroku supports Scala already) and we start to see more standard SDK support for them.

Tags: aws, go, languages, ruby, sdk