Go backend impacts all rules & incurs meaningful slowdowns

[kuza55]

Describe the bug
The go backend seems to not have any caching of import information, i.e. no concept of lockfiles, and additionally seems to need to figure out the imports for go targets, even when they are not being referenced in a rule.

Additionally, adding any go rules necessitates the installation of a go compiler when doing anything with pants.

The most noticeable issue with this is that every time pants starts, it spends ~30 seconds downloading imports for the small go program we have. Presumably this slowdown will increase as the size of our go codebase increases.

Pants version
2.17.0

OS
Linux

[benjyw]

Oof, sorry for the trouble. The Go backend is still experimental and needs some love. I have been looking at one related issue (#20274) but won't get to it until the new year. I did notice that Pants appears to do a lot of download-related work every time pantsd restarts, I'm not yet sure if it's actually downloading or just spending a lot of time scheduling download processes that are then resolved from cache. This all needs some triage.

[cjim8889]

+1, go-related stuffs still show up even when I am building a pure python pacakge.

[gniemann]

+1. We are in a mostly Python repo where we wanted to add Go. We found this issue so impactful that we were forced to disable the Go backend and are looking for other ways to use Go within the repo.

[benjyw]

Sorry for the bad experience. The Go backend really needs some attention and investment, ideally by an interested party. As an open-source project anyone is welcome to chip in! Also, if this is important to your engineering organization, there are folks who can do this kind of work on contract. Feel free to reach out to me on Slack and I can help find such a person.