Cgo is a powerful tool in the Go programmer’s arsenal. It allows Go programmers to interoperate with other languages. However, Cgo documentation is scarce and best practices for performance are hard to come by. In this tutorial session, I discuss lessons I've has learned working on the Go API for Wallaroo, a high-performance distributed stream processor written in Pony.
I cover hard-won knowledge about using Cgo in performance sensitive code including: ways in which Cgo makes interoperation with other languages difficult, how you can work around common sources of performance and scaling problems, and an issue with the Go runtime that can't be worked around.