Today, the Linux Foundation announced that Ent, an entity framework for Go that was developed and open sourced by Facebook in 2019, has moved under the governance of the Linux Foundation to help accelerate its development and foster the community of developers and companies using it.

Ent was designed to enable developers to work on complex backend applications. Developers working on these applications faced the challenge of maintaining a codebase used to manage hundreds of different entity types with numerous, complex relationships between them. Ent uses graph concepts to model an application’s schema and employs advanced code-generation techniques to create type-safe, efficient code that greatly simplifies working with databases compared to other approaches.

Ent is similar to traditional ORMs (Object-Relational Mappers) but takes an opinionated approach that is especially effective in improving developer productivity. 

First, schemas are modeled in graph concepts (nodes and edges) instead of the more common table-oriented method that makes traversing through datasets and expressing complex queries easier and less error-prone. 

Second, the code generated by Ent is completely type-safe, which means that many classes of common bugs are caught very early on in the development process. In addition, code editing software can understand Ent code very well to offer developers useful hints and feedback as they are typing code. 

Finally, schemas are defined in actual Go code, which facilitates a very rich feature set ranging from integrations with observability systems to the definition of privacy (authorization) rules right at the data-access layer. 

“From the start it was obvious that Ent would present a unique and compelling value proposition to a diverse range of use cases across any industry with complex technology stacks,” said Ariel Mashraki, Ent’s creator and lead maintainer. “The promise of collaborating with a broad coalition of users was the main reason we open-sourced Ent.” 

Since it was open-sourced in 2019, engineers from many leading companies have contributed code to Ent, including Facebook, GitHub, Mail.ru, Scaleway and VirtaHealth. Ent has also been used by the CNCF projects and by other open source ecosystems. Ariel Mashraki recently started a new company, Ariga, to create a data fabric solutions provider that is built on Ent. “With the move to the Linux Foundation’s neutral governance model, we (on behalf of myself and the rest of the Ent maintainers) hope to double-down on growing Ent into the industry standard for data-access in Go. You should expect to see a lot of exciting developments in the next six months from the community and we invite all to participate,” said Mashraki.

Ent is just the latest in a variety of technologies that Facebook has first open sourced to the public and then transferred control to the community. “This additional step of enabling open source contributors to take direct ownership of a project’s technical vision is part of our longstanding commitment to open and sustainable innovation,” said Michael Cheng, product manager at Facebook. “Enabling a project’s maintainers to chart their course often sparks additional investment, contributions and new companies building products and platforms based on that project, for example, GraphQL, Presto, ONNX, and Magma, to name a few. We see that Ent is already following a similar pattern and we’ll be cheering on the Ent community as it enters this next stage of exciting growth.”

You can learn more about Ent framework for Go, sample the technology, and contribute back to the project at https://github.com/ent/ent.

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