[jchw]

Between this and the IPv6 zone identifier issue, it feels like there's a bit of a trend of commenters more or less assuming Go is doing the wrong thing when it's actually following the standards/best practices more correctly than average. I wonder where this reputation came from.

[fragmede]

Most people accessing a site are likely not using Golang and are using Chrome. Thus Chrome is assumed right and Go is the one that's the outlier.

[jchw]

That's a different point, this particular thread is actually about a behavior that Chrome/OpenSSL/etc. have that is actually somewhat undesirable due to being complex and error prone.

Simply following Chrome/OpenSSL/etc. yields the best compatibility, but the Go behavior is much simpler in this very security critical path, and I'm not sure if it really occurs on the web. It seems most people are reporting it for other uses of X.509 like TPM. You can certainly see the argument in favor of Go's vastly simpler approach.

Go has a lot of trade-offs like this. If you can't decode from or encode into UTF-8 a given filename, Go's high level I/O APIs can't deal with it - depending on your exact point of view, the kinds of software you write and certainly some level of taste, you may see this as horrible, or you may see it as a totally reasonable trade-off. Some programs can go ahead and say "Sorry, we only support UTF-8 filenames" and some really can't.

But when being rational and reasoned it's really challenging to make the argument that Go's choices are bad due to inexperience from the language designers or standard library authors or general poor attention to detail. Calling the developers "Go kids" is already amusing considering it is very famously a project originally created by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer - not foolish young developers who are likely to repeat mistakes of the past by way of ignorance. Of course, that doesn't mean say, the TLS stack, deserves to carry some special weight just because the language was designed by computer science stalwarts, but I've dug into the Go TLS stack a fair bit in my leisure and to me personally it definitely does not feel like the work of people who are ignorant or foolish.

I may be over-indexing on two recent comments here, but it does sort of feel like there's an undercurrent of this, and it bums me out because I particularly like Go for the exact opposite reason, I really think a lot of the tradeoffs, love them or hate them, are very well thought out.

edit: For posterity sake, it is worth noting that it was wrong for me to say "Chrome/OpenSSL/etc." as Chrome actually has a similar behavior to Go here.