agilira 6 hours ago

Hey Hacker News,

I'm excited to share a project I've been pouring my heart into: Argus, a configuration management ecosystem for Go.

This all started out of a personal frustration: I needed a performant, lock-free hot-reload mechanism, but the existing solutions felt unreliable or introduced performance bottlenecks I wasn't comfortable with in production. Relying on OS-specific file-watching APIs (fsnotify) felt unpredictable, and the performance hit from reflection-based unmarshaling (mapstructure) was something I wanted to avoid entirely.

So, I built a solution from the ground up with a few core obsessions: extreme performance, deterministic reliability, and security as a first-class citizen.

Argus is the result. It's not just a library, but a full replacement for the entire stack. Here are the key architectural decisions that make it stand out:

Universal Polling Engine (BoreasLite): Argus replaces fsnotify with a custom-built, OS-independent polling engine. At its core is a lock-free MPSC ring buffer that achieves 39 million operations/sec in benchmarks. It's deterministic and works the same everywhere, from a Mac to a Docker container in Alpine.

Zero-Reflection Binding: To achieve HFT-level speed, configuration binding is done without any reflection. It uses unsafe.Pointer for direct, type-safe data mapping, resulting in near-zero overhead (~12 ns/op).

An Extensible Core for GitOps & Remote Config: The core of Argus is minimal and dependency-free. The real power for modern workflows comes from its provider system. I've built providers for Git, Consul, and Redis that enable true GitOps-style configuration management. Your configuration can live in a Git repository or a distributed KV store, and Argus will sync it atomically. This turns any application into a representation of your "Infrastructure as Code".

Security-Hardened by Design: This isn't an afterthought. Argus has been red-team tested against path traversal, DoS, and injection attacks. It includes a unified SQLite audit backend for forensic-quality, cross-application logging, essential for compliance (SOX, PCI-DSS).

It also comes with a full ecosystem, including an ultra-fast CLI framework (Orpheus) and flag parser (Flash-Flags), and optional OTEL integration.

I'd be honored if you took a look and shared your thoughts. I'm here to answer any questions!

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/agilira/argus

Provider Examples:

Git: https://github.com/agilira/argus-provider-git

Consul: https://github.com/agilira/argus-provider-consul

Redis: https://github.com/agilira/argus-provider-redis

Live Asciinema Demo: https://asciinema.org/a/Ew5Br2N5UD7rDe1F6MFVfNYrL