Interview with He Xinming on dubbo-go: The Go Implementation of Apache Dubbo

He Xinming, a technical expert from Ctrip's foundational middle‑platform R&D department and a core author of dubbo-go, discusses the project’s background, positioning, and why it was created to enable seamless communication between Go services and the Java‑based Apache Dubbo ecosystem.

The interview outlines the rapid growth of Go within Ctrip, the migration of dubbo-go to the Apache Software Foundation, and the release of version v1.0.0, which supports consumer and provider roles, HTTP/TCP transport, JsonRPC v2 and Hessian v2 serialization, ZooKeeper registration, failover clustering, random load balancing, and health‑check filters.

Key technical highlights include the use of the Getty asynchronous network I/O library, the development of a Hessian2 protocol implementation, and the extension mechanism that mirrors Dubbo’s SPI design, enabling developers to add custom functionality without modifying core code.

Performance testing shows the current benchmark reaching around 12,000 QPS on a 4×8 Xeon server and up to 20,000 QPS on higher‑end hardware, with ongoing optimization plans for Getty and Hessian2.

Future directions focus on further performance tuning, expanding load‑balancing and clustering strategies, adding routing rules, dynamic configuration, metrics, and tracing support, and aligning with Dubbo’s roadmap toward Service Mesh and cloud‑native deployments.

The interview also mentions real‑world adoption cases, such as Ctrip’s own Go services and ZTO Express’s Go‑to‑Java Dubbo calls, and invites the community to contribute to the project’s evolution.