You guys can keep complaining about how go is too verbose, but I love everything about go.
I love the error handling, I love the forced formatting, i love all the linting it has including style guides. When you read other source code it's so easy to understand it and make sense of it. Thank you go team
(Ok, maybe I am a bit sceptical with the latest generic additions, but overall it's a great language. I love it.)
Oh yeah totally agree. I don't understand why someone would want to write `slices.Contains(s, needle)` when you can write this beautiful poem like a Shakespeare in VSCode:
found := false
for _, v := range s {
if v == needle {
found = true
break
}
}
Oh and I totally want to build a stack trace manually. It's like doing cardio to me.
if err != nil {
return fmt.Errorf("my function name but in spaces: %w", err);
}
This is very elegant by the way, so that we need errors.Is now, which has to dynamically check if the error implements Unwrap() error or Unwrap() []error. Because having any language facilities for error handling is harmful.
> Because having any language facilities for error handling is harmful.
No, making error handling verbose mandatory is meant to make developers do mental cardio and be mindful of what they are doing.
You can either keep developers mindful or punish them after they make a mistake by shouting at them and make them waste their time during re-compiling.
P.S.: Yes, I love Go's error handling mechanics, which makes handling errors mandatory, not optional, and if you ignore the error, this is a deliberate choice and the burden is on the developer.
Go does the former, Rust does the latter.
Unpopular take, but I personally also believe that unchecked exceptions in Java and other languages like that are an issue - because it makes too easy to miss where things could go wrong, instead of making you visibly handle the potential known failure points, or indicate to callers what you're not handling.
What are you talking about, only Rust actually forces you to handle errors. Go functions merely return a tuple with an error along with the result, with a convention that you must checktror a non-nil error before using the result.
Rust bakes this into the type system, a function can truly return a result or an error.
Rust is neither the only nor the first language to contain a result type (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Result_type). Definitely a much nicer way to handle errors though.
In practice you use Go with a linter, so this is not a problem in practice. I have never seen a missed error.
The problem is painstakingly and manually having to build the stack trace, and then unwrapping it few layers above if you ever need to check what error it was.
> So, you handle the error in the end, or forcefully and intentionally ignore it. Again, if the code goes boom, it's on the developer, not on Go.
Except Go doesn’t actually require you to handle the error. You can forget to handle the error, or forget to do a nil check. And Go won’t tell you until it crashes and explodes at runtime.
Technically the user’s fault, but good systems protect the users from their own mistakes.
I am skeptical about Go's error handling, but there are cases where it is desirable to return both a result and also an error, like returning what can be returned while warning users about any errors. That can be modeled in Rust and other languages as well, though it is the default for Go.
This comment could make the same point and be even more effective if wasn't written as a snarky retort in violation of several of the guidelines of the site ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html )
I don't say it's perfect, but right in this moment I feel most comfortable with go and I don't mind jumping through a few hoops or writing things multiple times
The more common steelman for go is "most programmers are idiots, so a language designed for idiots is a good tradeoffs since it's easier to hire programmers for a codebase in that language"
I think that one is true. Like, if you're building something that is able to be successful despite having a poor type system, frequent panics, and difficult to correctly use concurrency primitives, Go is a great language for letting the lowest common denominator programmer be productive.
If you're building more serious software, then it can be a very bad tradeoff that destroys your company or product, but you know, that's true of a bunch of languages.
Also, if error wrapping hurts you so much (I don't use it), just implement a project-specific error that works how you want. This could be something that is JSON serializable, that captures a line number at each return site, etc. It will take like 10 minutes to get your project's errors working exactly how you want.
My projects usually do -
log.SetFlags(log.LstdFlags | log.Lshortfile)
// ...
if err != nil {
log.Println(err)
return errors.New("Error doing the thing.")
}
That essentially logs a stack trace with line numbers up the whole error chain, each return adding the outer context. I only ever use errors.Is for os.ErrNotExist.
I know about slices module. But GP is not happy about generics apparently.
I think your error solution is good. But still it's a poor imitation of Exceptions wherein you have to capture the stack trace manually, possibly incuring a perf hit (haven't measured), and write handling code in every layer. Made worse by the fact that people return desperate errors for even precondition violations which should be panics.
1. There is nothing stopping you from implementing a Contains function.
2.That error handling is one of the best features. It makes me explicitly acknowledge the errors instead of letting them just happen. No error goes unnoticed!
Each if err != nil is an explicit reminder to check, do I need to clean up? Do I need to log this error to a file?
"And no more oh an error happened I wonder where"
With LLMs verbosity is not an excuse anymore. Just generate it and focus on other things then
found := false
for _, v := range s {
if v == needle {
found = true
break
}
}
Do you see it? It copies the v into a local variable, which could be tremendously wasteful if it's a large struct. You should instead be taking a pointer to s[i] and comparing the value there with `needle`.
If you'd used `slices.Contains(s, needle)`, on the other hand, it could have such a performance bug in it and you'd never know.
> If you'd used `slices.Contains(s, needle)`, on the other hand, it could have such a performance bug in it and you'd never know.
Perhaps you're much better at programming than I am, but I prefer these semantics in a language because I figure they're much more likely to have been optimized empirically, support vectorization, and be less buggy than another rote loop I'm trying to speed through.
That is just a silly rationalisation by primitivists, and they will never be able to articulate any rational point where abstracts makes sense, in their world, whatever Russ Cox and a bunch of Google employees deem fit is the ideal.
Even when Russ Cox and Go team had come to term with reality and stopped pretending like we are in 70s still, these lot will move goalposts. It is a kind of psychosis and sycophancy that is beyond rational discourse.
> on the other hand, it could have such a performance bug in it and you'd never know.
wut...? the debate isn't between closed (incompetent) source and open (competent) source - the debate is between verbose language and expressive language.
Even if you prefer manually checking for errors after every call that might fail, I fail to see how one can love go’s verbosity. Compare go’s
foo, err := bar()
if err != nil {
return ERR;
}
with something like (hypothetical)
foo := bar() ||| return ERR;
where the compiler, seeing that bar returns an Either<int,err> can enforce the presence of the ||| clause or, alternatively, require later code to check for errors if the ||| clause isn’t present. I think that’s both more robust (prevents one from forgetting to check for errors) and shorter (allowing for showing a lot more code on a screen or page)
I think the examples are both bad along different axis. One occupies more lines, the other results in _more_ and uglier syntax. They’re both bad. So the question is which axis is worse.
While the first occupies more lines I suspect I’d spend less time spotting it in the code. The physical shape of the expression is something my brain is used to seeing after 40 years of programming. Even when code grows more complex.
The second is OK when it stands alone, but I am not so certain it would be as easy to spot in more complex surroundings. Even on a single line, there is something a bit ugly about the code. Even before we get to the desperate triple-pipe. That kind of reminds me of the desperate attempts at repairing JS after they realized its equality semantics were shot. Just heap more characters on it.
The thing is: it is actually very hard to judge how ergonomic a language is by just looking at it. You have to use it and you have to use it enough to realize where the paint points really are. I’ve read through a lot of the responses in this discussion and I’ll be honest: I think a lot of people who criticize other languages (be they Rust, C, Go or whatever) aren’t very fluent in them. It takes a couple of years to develop fluency.
There are so many proposals for improving errors, even half implemented ones that are dropped. I even stopped checking pros and cons after a few. As ultimately everything got rejected and the message is that you have to live with verbose checking with llms now.
100% with you on every point. It's the only language I've worked in that lets me read other codebases without an hour or two of "wut?" happening, so they did something right!
Yes, I find the K8s codebase pretty easy to read actually, but I am biased since I work with K8s and the codebase makes a lot of sense when you understand what everything does already.
Kubernetes is a behemoth, but the Docker (Moby) source code is actually pretty easy to get into (if you're already a Docker user and understand how containers work)
The point is in Go it's pretty hard to write code so ugly that it'll be hard to read. I'm actually quite confident I could quickly onboard on almost any Go codebase (Kubernetes might be an exception). When I used to work with Java, I very rarely even tried to read the source code of my dependencies because it was unreadable.
I love how during prototyping, the compiler will tell me off for having an unused variable and fail to compile. I totally love the idea of crashing when writing on a closed channel.
When I moved from Kotlin to Go because of a job change. it was painful. Apart from its runtime benefits, it is overrated IMO. it lacks basic conveniences. Go is not a simple language, it is a primitive language.
I do love the batteries included attitude. Having benchmarking included as well as a mechanism to run tests to check (test) for race-conditions right from the language/build tool is amazing.
My only wish is that go could become less verbose. There are several frontends to go that are more compact, compile down into golang, and then let you enjoy all the benefits.
I think that the best feature that go was able to create is a very strong community around the language, where practices are as important as the language itself. Maybe these practices are what makes the community strong?
Also not adding every single feature that could be nice is a good thing to me. Yes, there is a lot of syntactic sugar you could add, but this just ends up in even more debates and in the end it doesn't matter that much. There is a very clear path how to achieve regular things in go and that works fine for now
For SpiceDB[0], we've found a lot of success using this framework to define our own analyzers; it's probably 10x easier now with LLMs. No need for tribal knowledge or more time wasted on code review if you can just turn it into a linter and move on.
The Go team's emphasis on tooling in the service of software engineering is a boon to human and agentic development alike. Give yourself and your agents great tools.
An example from one of my recent projects: https://github.com/verdverm/gmd/blob/main/Makefile (give agents simple "tool calls" instead of needing to divine the correct args/flags every time, essentially invocable agents.md content)
One of the interesting things to call out from this is using build tags for testing { unit, coverage, recorded, real api }, with the buffet allowing the agent to iterate faster and more targeted. I tend to run the linting and coverage in a new session, have a report generated, and then another fresh session to start dealing with gaps.
the most valuable thing in this article for me was this:
The early loop looked like this:
/goal improve the perf by 20%
-> a great deal of plausible code
-> a confusing benchmark
-> another plausible patch
Later it looked like this:
find the expensive work
-> explain why it happens
-> change one mechanism
-> compare with the previous Rust revision
-> test the complete application
-> retain, revise, or reject
Someone in the thread about the Ruff update ingenuously said they wished Go had something like Ruff, being unaware of this framework. In that thread, someone seemed to take it as a sign that many people who might care to know about this don't yet, so they made a dedicated post for it.
I love the error handling, I love the forced formatting, i love all the linting it has including style guides. When you read other source code it's so easy to understand it and make sense of it. Thank you go team
(Ok, maybe I am a bit sceptical with the latest generic additions, but overall it's a great language. I love it.)