[crankycoder1975]

We needed performance as well as simplicity.

We started by extending logstash, but our needs were more "we need a router" and logstash isn't meant to be a router.

Statically linking the world isn't trivial. For our existing Python code bases - how are you going to deal with third party libraries from PyPI?

Come by on #heka on irc.mozilla.org, we're kicking around in there.

[mapleoin]

> Statically linking the world isn't trivial. For our existing Python code bases - how are you going to deal with third party libraries from PyPI?

Depends on what you want?

You could freeze the pip-requires to always install the same version and use a virtualenv per application. This is basically the same as bundling everything together, it has all the benefits with the least amount of work.

You could use distribution packages for security, correctness and stability or even roll your own repository inside your infrastructure to absolutely control everything.

Finally you could just bundle everything manually by fooling around with the PYTHONPATH and putting all the dependencies in a single directory. This is kind of like improvising your own virtualenv, it's very hacky, but it can work.

[nonsequitarian]

Another member of the Heka team here. Yes, there are a lot of options for managing Python deployments. But none of Python's stories are as nice as "Here's a single binary, put this on every machine."

[jonastryggvi]

Exactly! I started playing with Go a few days ago, and immediately started thinking that this would be the perfect language to create something like LogStash, Flume or SplunkAgents in - and install to the machines that need to forward data to our centralised logging system.

It really bugs me that I have to have an Python interpeter on the frontend web machines (cause I would prefer not to have a C compiler there)..

[mapleoin]

> It really bugs me that I have to have an Python interpeter on the frontend web machines (cause I would prefer not to have a C compiler there)..

You don't need to have a C compiler installed for the Python interpreter to work. I hope you're joking...