[dontlaugh]

And yet goroutines share the same address space, don’t have a good way for the parent to wait for them and even panic silently.

There’s a reason many projects ban the go keyword in favour of a wrapper that fixes some of this.

Go requires constant vigilance, sadly.

[bheadmaster]

Yes, as I said, Go doesn't make it impossible to make mistakes. It doesn't hold your hand and slap you when you go off-road.

But saying it "requires constant vigilance" is an overstatement. As long as you put a little bit of thought in the concurrent code you're writing, it's very easy to do things right. Data races are easy to avoid if you only transfer ownership by sending pointers through channels.

[dontlaugh]

It would’ve been trivial to make the language disallow nil, separate goroutine address spaces, crash the process on unhandled panic in any goroutine, etc.

The reason Go annoys people is the unforced errors. Sure, it gets a lot right. But what it gets wrong had solutions long before Go existed and those solutions were wilfully ignored.

[bheadmaster]

> It would’ve been trivial to make the language disallow nil

Which would interfere with Go's philosophy that zero should be a valid (usable) state for types. What would be the default value of a reference type without nil?

> separate goroutine address spaces

This is not trivial to implement. The only way I can think of is to start each goroutine in a new process, which brings along other downsides - everything must be copied, cannot pass file/socket handlers between goroutines, etc. Doesn't seem to be worth it.

> crash the process on unhandled panic in any goroutine

Go does crash the process on unhandled panic in any goroutine:

    # main.go
    package main

    func main() {
        go func() {
            panic("hehe")
        }()

        for {
        }
    }

    # go run main.go
    panic: hehe

    goroutine 5 [running]:
    main.main.func1()
            /[...]/main.go:5 +0x27
    created by main.main
            /[...]/main.go:4 +0x25
    exit status 2

> The reason Go annoys people is the unforced errors.

This is the criticism I've also had, and raised an issue on GitHub. Unfortunately, it's impossible to fix this without breaking backwards compatibility.

> But what it gets wrong had solutions long before Go existed and those solutions were wilfully ignored.

They were wilfully ignored, but only because the tradeoffs didn't seem worth it at the moment. You make it sound bad, as if Go devs were simply high on crack and knew what they doing was wrong, but did it anyways, when in reality it's more of a case of those "solutions" not being compatible with the goals of the language, or simply nobody coming up with an elegant way to incorporate it.

[ImprobableTruth]

>Which would interfere with Go's philosophy that zero should be a valid (usable) state for types. What would be the default value of a reference type without nil?

... but nil is not actually a usable reference. You can't do anything with it that you can do with a real reference.

The whole zero values for every type might seem neat philosophically, but never struck me as sensible.

[dontlaugh]

Sum types let you have default values without pervasive nil. That’s not new either, it’s been done since at least ML.

Separate address spaces are trivial when you have a runtime, just look at Erlang.

Go could’ve also copied Erlang’s supervision trees to ensure safe and bounded goroutine lifetime.

For all their impressive achievements, Go’s creators suffer from extreme NIH syndrome. Just look at Plan 9.

[Thaxll]

When you see the performace of Erlang, you understand why Go did not want to go this way.

[dontlaugh]

There are many other reasons for Erlang having worse overall performance.

Go even shipped with segmented stacks! Also separating goroutine heaps would've been cheap by comparison. It would've also made it easier to achieve good garbage collector throughput, which Go still struggles with to this day.

Go could've also had the `go` keyword work differently, by requiring/returning some kind of handle that must be waited to potentially panic, or explicitly ignored. It would've made it impossible to incorrectly use WaitGroups, without any additional runtime overhead.

Don't get me wrong, Go is still a useful language. It's just frustrating that it failed to be great language for no good reason.

[bheadmaster]

Sum types are optional. And if you make them obligatory, they become just syntax sugar for nil. What would be the default value of a non-sum reference type, without nil?

Erlang's "address space isolation" is not real address space isolation, only semantic. Erlang "processes" are all still in the same address space, but the language semantics doesn't allow them to interfere with one another.

You can implement bounded goroutine lifetime by using sync.WaitGroup and other constructs for coordinating goroutines. Go just doesn't force you to.

> Go’s creators suffer from extreme NIH syndrome. Just look at Plan 9.

This is just bad faith arguing. Plan 9 was revolutionary in many ways, and brushing it off as just NIH makes me think you don't understand or recognize its achievements.

[dontlaugh]

An Optional defaulting to None when created can still fail to compile if you don't check whether it's None when you use it. Same with a Result defaulting to an Error.

The problem with nil for any pointer or interface is that you can compile code dereferencing it without first checking if it's nil.

[throwawaymaths]

The problem is not the existence of nil. It's that nils can propagate. The language doesn't check, for example, that if a function can return nil, it has to declare it in its signature, There isn't even a convention where if a function nils, it gets a certain name.

[weakfish]

Can’t the parent wait by simply using the waitgroup sync functionality? That’s what I’ve been doing in my greenfield Go project at work.

[dontlaugh]

Sure, but you can neglect to do it or get it wrong. The language could expose primitives that don’t allow it instead.

In practice, where I work we disallow the go keyword in review and require use of a wrapper that takes in a closure and also is a wait group. It’s much harder to get wrong.