Why is segmentio/kafka-go used, is it one library or two? How do producer and consumer work?

segmentio/kafka-go is a single Go library for working with Apache Kafka, developed by Segment. It provides a convenient and efficient API for Kafka producers and consumers.

Producer in kafka-go sends messages to Kafka topics. It manages serialization, partitioning, and delivery acknowledgments.

Consumer reads messages from topics, supports offset management, load balancing among consumers, and error handling.

Example of creating a producer and sending a message:

import (
    "context"
    "github.com/segmentio/kafka-go"
)

func produce() error {
    w := kafka.Writer{
        Addr:     kafka.TCP("localhost:9092"),
        Topic:    "example-topic",
        Balancer: &kafka.LeastBytes{},
    }
    defer w.Close()

    err := w.WriteMessages(context.Background(),
        kafka.Message{
            Key:   []byte("Key-A"),
            Value: []byte("Hello Kafka"),
        },
    )
    return err
}

Thus, kafka-go is a unified library that covers the main scenarios of working with Kafka in Go, simplifying integration and increasing reliability.