Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by billmcneale 379 days ago
> If a function fails, then you need to handle its failure

And this is exactly where Go fails, because it allows you to completely ignore the error, which will lead to a crash.

I'm a bit baffled that you correctly identified that this is a requirement to produce robust software and yet, you like Go's error handling approach...

2 comments

On every project I ship I require golangci-lint to pass to allow merge, which forces you to explicitly handle or ignore errors. It forbids implicitly ignoring errors.

Note that ignoring errors doesn't necessarily lead ti a crash; there are plenty of functions where an error won't ever happen in practice, either because preconditions are checked by the program before the function call or because the function's implementation has changed and the error return is vestigal.

Yet the problem still has happened on big projects:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36398874

Pedantically, every single one of those examples are a case of unspecified behaviour, not bugs. There may be no meaningful difference to the end user, but there is a big difference from a developer perspective. Can we find cases of the same where behaviour was specified?
> which will lead to a crash

No it won't. It could lead to a crash or some other nasty bug, but this is absolutely not a fact you can design around, because it's not always true.