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by mdaniel 1269 days ago
> The import statement maps strings to symbols. No complicated module system to learn. The strings are resolved to something like URLs, but that's not part of the language. It's very easy to see code on GitHub and import it.

This is for sure untrue, unless one is already steeped in the golang ecosystem.

  $ cat go.mod
  requires (
    github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v3 v3.43.1
  )
oh, cool, I can just navigate to https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/tree/v3.43.1/sdk/v3 to view the source ... oh, :sad-trombone: it's 404. Well, why is that?

  $ curl https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/blob/v3.43.1/sdk/go.mod | head 1
  module github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v3
Oh, because the "module" line is decoupled from the apparent URL. Then there's this `gopkg.in/yaml.v2` nonsense, as described by this: https://go.dev/src/cmd/go/internal/help/helpdoc.go#L251

Meaning navigating to https://gopkg.in/yaml.v2 gets one thing, but https://gopkg.in/yaml.v2?go-get=1 produces another and only a view-source of the latter shows what golang is going to use. Yes, I'm aware that out of the kindness of the author's heart the browser version does link to the alleged source repo, but alleged is the key part of that
1 comments
alphazard 1269 days ago
The Go module system has some cruft that could only really be removed in Go 2. The gopkg stuff was an attempt to bring the fragmented ecosystem along to the current solution. It's not perfect, but the important stuff (like version selection) the go.sum file etc, is well designed.

You're quoting me talking about the Go import statement, and then shifting to talking about Go modules. The import statement, at the level of the language maps a string to a symbol. Packages are just directories. I meant to compare it to the more complicated package/module systems which are built into other languages like Python or Rust.

I said:

> It's very easy to see code on GitHub and import it.

Which I maintain is true. I usually just type the import line into my text editor and the tooling figures out the rest, or prompts me to "go get". Your example talks about going in the reverse direction, which I never claimed was easy. I don't think I've ever had to do that either. If I want to see the exact version of a library, the go tool has downloaded it to the local filesystem.

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