A way to indicate library usage and perhaps ratings on godoc.org?

[bex]

Hey all,

I've been looking for libraries on godoc.org recently and find myself wondering how to judge a library for use.  At the moment the only real way to do it is to read the source and/or try it out.  This is fine but when there are a lot of libraries doing a specific thing and no clear indicator of which if any is better than others it can be quite difficult and time consuming to decide which one to use. 

I realize lots of folks in the go community prefer to just work against the standard library, but clearly there are cases where you don't need or want to reinvent the wheel and where a library cna be useful.

I'm wondering if it'd be worthwhile to make an effort to support a mechanism to see the number of installs/uses of a library and/or let people using the library rate the library if they are finding it good.  I've seen this sort of mechanism work fairly well on NPM within the node.js community.  Obviously there are some technical difference in terms of something like tracking installs, but the core of the idea to have a way to see libraries which are most used or most endorsed can be really helpful when choosing a library to evaluate yourself.

Anyway, just wanted to see what others thought of the idea.

[Joshua Marsh]

On Wednesday, May 22, 2013 9:57:43 AM UTC-6, bex wrote:

Hey all,

I'm wondering if it'd be worthwhile to make an effort to support a mechanism to see the number of installs/uses of a library and/or let people using the library rate the library if they are finding it good.  I've seen this sort of mechanism work fairly well on NPM within the node.js community.  Obviously there are some technical difference in terms of something like tracking installs, but the core of the idea to have a way to see libraries which are most used or most endorsed can be really helpful when choosing a library to evaluate yourself.

Getting install counts seems like it might be difficult. I can see a rating system being helper or even a hit count on the documentation being worthwhile though.

[Arne Hormann]

Install counts may be impossible - but godoc could evaluate imports and count them.

[Ewan Chou]

Take a look at http://gowalker.org it shows the hit count of libraries.

[Chris Hines]

godoc already does that, but it is not prominently displayed. Scroll to the bottom of any library's page and you will see a message like this:

Package <pkg name> imports 5 packages (graph) and is imported by 2 packages. Updated 3 days ago. Refresh.