[iainmerrick]

Lots of people have made the same complaint/observation, though, and I don’t think they’re all just “rounding it off to one bit” as you describe.

I think they’re onto something, though as the GP notes, hopefully the situation is improving.

I’d flip your response around and suggest that in several cases, the correct fix is obvious and the core Go team’s insistence on extreme caution and “nuance” is misguided. GOPATH is a great example -- it’s just so obviously wrongheaded that I really don’t understand why it stuck around so long.

Another one that comes to mind, although this is quite old now, is the way early versions of Go would insist that the very last statement of a function was a “return”; you couldn’t do an “if foo { return x } else { return y }”, for example. It took a lot of pushing to persuade the core team to add some basic escape analysis, against insistence that it was some kind of nuanced feature with unpredictable side-effects, rather than a trivial thing that every other real compiler has to do.