[jerf]

I just don't get this attitude. I'm asking for the compiler to break my code if something I depended on changes. The alternative is the risky one! This is the safe alternative.

Compiler errors aren't evil. They're a tool. They work best when there is a one-to-one correspondence between problems and errors. That's not possible in the general case, but the closer we get, the better. And the worst case is not when I get a spurious error. That's easy to deal with. The worst case is when I don't get an error I should have. If you're going to worry about "riskiness", that's the risk that should keep you up at night. Not compiler errors for things that turn out to be no big deal, and can quite likely be fixed with one quick go fmt -s.

[AYBABTME]

In all other cases I'd want the compiler to break my code. The problem here is that this technique is very fallible, the chance for false negative, undetected errors is high. It's risky because there's a ton of cases where you won't get a compiler error. It's unduly making you feel safe, which is not a good thing in my opinion. This is mostly why I think it's risky, because you feel safe when you shouldn't.

With keyed-fields, the worst case is that you have uninitialized fields, which typically doesn't cause much problems and get caught quickly where it matters. With unkeyed-fields, you might have code that compiles but sets unexpected fields. Things that would otherwise panic, now just keep working without you noticing, until strange things happen and you have to review all initializations and remember the struct layout every time you see the struct being created.

Personally, I don't like both techniques anyways. It's too error prone. I'll prefer writing a small constructor where I handle initialization deliberately. It's not super Go-ish but at least I centralize all the issues surrounding struct initialization in 1 place: the constructor. Then when I change what fields go in the struct, I change the function signature and the compiler breaks and doesn't let things fall through silently.

[JoeAltmaier]

I agree. But the industry is hurtling down a tunnel of weak typing and runtime checking. So compiler features are diminishing in relevance at a geometric rate.

[jerf]

I see the exact opposite trend happening. Weak typing is plateauing. It's the last moment of apparent strength before long, slow, but inevitable collapse. Most interesting work is being done on the static side right now, partially because there's no more work to be done on the dynamic side. (A great deal of being dynamic is precisely throwing away all the structure you might build further features on.)

You can also see this in how all the dynamic languages are working on adding "optional" or "incremental" dynamic typing. Static languages, by contrast, generally create one dynamic type, stick it in a library somewhere, and let the small handful of people who really need it use it. Few, if any, of them are adding any dynamic features. The motion trends are clear.