[win311fwg]

You'd probably have to be doing something pretty unusual to not use a worker queue. Your "P.S." point being a perfect case in point as to why.

If you have a legitimate reason for doing something unusual, it is fine to have to use the tools unusually. It serves as a useful reminder that you are purposefully doing something unusual rather than simply making a bad design choice. A good language makes bad design decisions painful.

[mort96]

You have now transformed the easy problem of "iterate through some files" into the much more complex problem of either finding a work queue library or writing your own work queue library; and you're baking in the assumption that the only reasonable way to use that work queue is to make each work item exactly one file.

What you propose is not a bad solution, but don't come here and pretend it's the only reasonable solution for almost all situations. It's not. Sometimes, you want each work item to be a list of files, if processing one file is fast enough for synchronisation overhead to be significant. Often, you don't have to care so much about the wall clock time your loop takes and it's fast enough to just do sequentially. Sometimes, you're implementing a non-important background task where you intentionally want to only bother one core. None of these are super unusual situations.

It is telling that you keep insisting that any solution that's not a one-file-per-work-item work queue is super strange and should be punished by the language's design, when you haven't even responded to my core argument that: sometimes sequential is fast enough.

[win311fwg]

> It is telling that you keep insisting

Keep insisting? What do you mean by that?

> when you haven't even responded to my core argument that: sometimes sequential is fast enough.

That stands to reason. I wasn't responding to you. The above comment was in reply to nasretdinov.

[mort96]

Your comment was in reply to nasretdinov, but its fundamental logic ignores what I've been telling you this whole time. You're pretending that the only solution to iterating through files is a work queue and that any solution that does a synchronous open/close for each iteration is fundamentally bad. I have told you why it isn't: you don't always need the performance.

[nasretdinov]

Using a "work queue", i.e. a channel would still have a for loop like

  for filename := range workQueue {
      fp, err := os.Open(filename)
      if err != nil { ... }
      defer fp.Close()
      // do work
  }

Which would have the same exact problem :)

[win311fwg]

I don't see the problem.

    for _, filename := range files {
        queue <- func() {
            f, _ := os.Open(filename)
            defer f.Close()
        }
    }

or more realistically,

    var group errgroup.Group
    group.SetLimit(10)
    for _, filename := range files {
        group.Go(func() error {
            f, err := os.Open(filename)
            if err != nil {
                return fmt.Errorf("failed to open file %s: %w", filename, err)
            }
            defer f.Close()  
            // ...
            return nil          
        })
    }
    if err := group.Wait(); err != nil {
        return fmt.Errorf("failed to process files: %w", err)
    }

Perhaps you can elaborate?

I did read your code, but it is not clear where the worker queue is. It looks like it ranges over (presumably) a channel of filenames, which is not meaningfully different than ranging over a slice of filenames. That is the original, non-concurrent solution, more or less.

[mort96]

I think they imagine a solution like this:

    // Spawn workers
    for _ := range 10 {
        go func() {
            for path := range workQueue {
                fp, err := os.Open(path)
                if err != nil { ... }
                defer fp.Close()
                // do work
            }
        }()
    }

    // Iterate files and give work to workers
    for _, path := range paths {
        workQueue <- path
    }

[win311fwg]

Maybe, but why would one introduce coupling between the worker queue and the work being done? That is a poor design.

Now we know why it was painful. What is interesting here is that the pain wasn't noticed as a signal that the design was off. I wonder why?

We should dive into that topic. I suspect at the heart of it lies why there is so much general dislike for Go as a language, with it being far less forgiving to poor choices than a lot of other popular languages.

[mort96]

I think your issue is that you're an architecture astronaut. This is not a compliment. It's okay for things to just do the thing they're meant to do and not be super duper generic and extensible.

[win311fwg]

It is perfectly okay inside of a package. Once you introduce exports, like as seen in another thread, then there is good reason to think more carefully about how users are going to use it. Pulling the rug out from underneath them later when you discover your original API was ill-conceived is not good citizenry.

But one does still have to be mindful if they want to write software productively. Using a "super duper generic and extensible" solution means that things like error propagation is already solved for you. Your code, on the other hand, is going to quickly become a mess once you start adding all that extra machinery. It didn't go unnoticed that you conveniently left that out.

Maybe that no longer matters with LLMs, when you don't even have to look the code and producing it is effectively free, but LLMs these days also understand how defer works so then this whole thing becomes moot.