Go: What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong

Re:Go: What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong by earthboundkid on Friday January 05, 2024 @10:23AM (#38879978)

I see people say that they're confused by it a lot, sure. But do the bugs get to production? That was my question. Buffer overflows get to production all the time! But do the concrete vs interface nils get to production or are they caught in dev and then someone opens an issue to ask why it doesn't work? I suspect it's more the later.

Obviously, it would be better if Go didn't have this problem. If I made Go 2, it would have blank interface be "none" and blank pointer be "null". Even better, I would add a reference type that can't be null and sum types or something like that. But these things are all relative.

In Python, people using "is" for numbers is a problem. But in practice only very junior developers do that and it mostly gets caught in dev. There was the Digg outage caused by a default argument being [] instead of None https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ and that I see as a slightly more serious bug that can slip by without good code review.

Every language has pitfalls and the question is whether they outweigh the other benefits.

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Re:Go: What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong by bb88 on Friday January 05, 2024 @01:39PM (#38882801)

> But do the bugs get to production? That was my question.

Yes, in my case anyway. That code didn't have any unit tests around it. Goland didn't flag it. It's a pattern that was "surprising" to me at least. Particularly since it breaks with tradition.

I consider Goland to be invaluable when coding go. But still, it's not perfect.

> There was the Digg outage caused by a default argument being [] instead of None

FWIW Pycharm flags this now, and can fix this automatically. Not sure about VSCode.

I guess the point I'm making is IDE's should find the novice mistakes, and then a lot of my complaints about languages go away.

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