Next have been oddities with vendoring workflows. Given previous decisions it seemed like the golang team was driving towards vendored solutions but with go mod they seem to have backed off of that position. The workflows with go mod are clunkier & less well documented. Unfortunately I’m (and my teams) are highly invested in vendored libraries.
We’ve also had trouble with it not playing nice with dependencies that have not taken up modules (and some that are unlikely to).
That’s not even to mention my problem with their design or the hamfisted way they have gone about it, which is something I just have to get past.
It seems this gets fixed in Go 1.12 though. AIUI you'll be able to set GOMODULES=on, unset GOPATH and just continue working as before.
CLASSPATH, PYTHON_PATH, PERL5LIB, ...
I never really understand the hate here. It seems more like they didn't hate GOPATH specifically and more that they didn't like not having a package manager.
Basically before go 1.11, it was impossible to just do
git clone ... somedir
cd somedir
# build code and run something
That's not true. It was always perfectly possible to do that, the code you build just couldn't import any libraries not installed in GOPATH. AIUI that is exactly the same as in other languages.
I guess it is not all that different from Python, with Python you need to add the source path to PYTHONPATH / sys.path (and often do so at runtime in the entrypoint script). With go you need the "src/github.com/dagss" prefix to the path. Or at least, according to conventions. You are right that it is more similar on a technical level than what I thought.
You can put your code anywhere you want and `go build` and `go run` will work just fine.
It's only third party libraries that have to be in GOPATH, which is exactly a library (well, package) search path.
ie if your code itself is split into modules, they won't work (as they are imported by their full path, not relatively), and anything in your vendor dir is also ignored when used outside of a GOPATH entry.
The current way I handle it is that $HOME/.local is my GOPATH, and $HOME/src links to $HOME/.local/src. So you can just have $HOME/src/github.com/bar/foo -- which is less ideal than just $HOME/src/foo, but it's something at least.
But, yes, I rolled my eyes when learning about GOPATH for the first time.