[sidlls]

I'm no fan of go, although I think it's better than many other languages for services, but the argument here is against the label "append", not the operation. It's a poor name for the operation, but the documentation is quite clear about what's going on. I'd argue that understanding the keywords and builtins of a language is the bare minimum an engineer should do before he starts writing anything in it.

[erik_seaberg]

  s2 := append(s1, x)
  s3 := append(s1, y)

shouldn’t be allowed, because what it’s likely to do is not what anyone meant. In a pass-by-value language, passing a slice or map by value should copy it, append should be a method that returns void, and passing a pointer should be the way to share state and avoid copies.

[sethammons]

What would you expect that code to do?

I'd expect to have two different slices, s2 and s3, to contain all the same elements aside from the last.

[a, b, c, x] and [a, b, c, y] and s1 remains [a, b, c]

[Groxx]

When printing s1, s2, then s3:

It does exactly that, yes: https://go.dev/play/p/rs2FeK_QUjs

    [a b c]
    [a b c x]
    [a b c y]

But maybe it doesn't: https://go.dev/play/p/Na-eL0sOV9e

    [a b c]
    [a b c y]  <- this is now "y"
    [a b c y]

So... maybe they share the same backing array? Lets try setting s2[0] to "z" after appending with the original code: https://go.dev/play/p/mAB-gUb0shB

    [a b c]
    [z b c x]
    [a b c y]

Apparently not. But also apparently yes? https://go.dev/play/p/k1ciGzyS2gc

    [z b c]    <- this changed too
    [z b c y]
    [z b c y]

Let's try appending just one more item before redoing ^ that example, where they all shared the same data: https://go.dev/play/p/5JneXHMeUjx

    [a b c]
    [z b c x x2]
    [a b c y y2]

Notice that in all of these examples, I haven't explicitly declared a length or capacity. There's nothing "funny looking" or clearly intentionally allowing these different behaviors, it's just simple, very-common slice use.

.... so yeah. This is a source of a number of hard-to-track-down bugs.

[Jcowell]

Is there a bug or issue on this in their GitHub cause wtf is this ?

[Groxx]

This is expected behavior. It's just an easy thing to screw up by accident.

[sethammons]

Amazing, very interesting