go VS golangci-lint

Make sure you have Go installed https://go.dev/.

The Go Programming Language

When Go first shipped, it was already well-documented that the only stable ABI on some platforms was via dynamic libraries (such as libc) provided by said platforms. Go knowingly and deliberately ignored this on the assumption that they can get away with it. And then this happened:

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16606

If that's not "getting burned", I don't know what is. "Trying to provide a nice feature" is an excuse, and it can be argued that it is a valid one, but nevertheless they knew that they were using an unstable ABI that could be pulled out from under them at any moment, and decided that it's worth the risk. I don't see what that has to do with "not being as broadly compatible as they had hoped", since it was all known well in advance.

Sadly, I think that is indeed radically different from Go’s design. Go lacks anything like sum types, and proposals to add them to the language have revealed deep issues that have stalled any development. See https://github.com/golang/go/issues/57644

I've been writing a lot about Go and gRPC lately:

I have a mountain of respect for Bell Labs and its contributions to the public welfare, and a lot of respect for the current group of alumni, mostly at Google, and mostly affiliated to a greater or lesser degree with golang. I have my differences with one or two of them (Pike telegraphs a wildly overcompensated imposter syndrome, but he’s almost as much of a genius as he acts like he is and who am I to judge on an overcompensated imposter syndrome, moreover when the guy in at the next desk over is Ken Thompson, who wouldn’t be a little intimidated by the legend).

With that said, golang is too opinionated for its level of adoption, too out-of-touch with emerging consensus (and I’m being generous with “emerging” here, the Either monad is more than an emerging consensus around the right default for error handling), and too insular a leadership to be, in my personal opinion, a key contender outside some narrow niches.

I’m aware that there are avid advocates for golang on HN, and that I’m liable to upset some of them by saying so, so I’m going to use some examples to illustrate my point and to illustrate that I’ve done my homework before being critical.

Many, including myself, became aware of what is now called golang via this presentation at Google in 2007 (https://youtu.be/hB05UFqOtFA) introducing Newsqueak, a language Pike was pushing back in the mid-90s with what seems to be limited enthusiasm no greater than the enthusiasm for its predecessor Squeak. Any golang hacker will immediately recognize the language taking shape on the slides.

I’ve been dabbling with golang for something like a decade now, because I really want to like it. But like a lot of the late labs stuff it seems to have suffered from the dangerous combination of the implications of Richard Gabriel’s Worse is Better observation: it was simpler, faster, cheaper, and ultimately more successful to incrementally adapt innovations from Plan9 into Linux (and other Unices), to adapt innovations from sam and acme into nvim/emacs (and now VSCode), and to adapt channel-based and other principled concurrency from Newsqueak/golang (not to mention Erlang and other more full-throated endorsements of that region of the design space) into now countless other languages ranging from things like TypeScript and Rust at the high end of adoption all the way to things like Haskell at more moderate levels of adoption. Ironically enough, the success of UTF-8 (a compromise for the non-ASCII world but the compromise that made it happen at all) is this same principle in action via the same folks!

And golang would be fine as yet another interesting language serving as a testbed for more pragmatic applications of radical ideas: but it’s got corporate sponsorship that puts Sun Microsystems and Java to shame in scale and scope, but done quietly enough to not set off the same alarm bells.

The best example of this is probably this GitHub issue: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19991 (though there are countless like it). I’ve worked with Tony Arcieri, he’s brilliant and humble and hard-working and while we haven’t kept in touch, I keep an eye out, and he’s clearly passionate about the success of golang. But proposal after proposal for some variation of the Either monad has died on procedural grounds for nearly a decade, all while being about the only thing that everyone else agrees on in modern industrial PLT: TypeScript supports it, Rust supports it, C++ de-facto supports it via things like abseil and folly, and of course the hard-core functional community never even bothered with something worse in the modern era. You can even kind of do it, but there are intentional limitations in the way generics get handled across compilation units to ensure it never gets adopted as a community-driven initiative. Try if you don’t believe me (my golang code has a Result type via emacs lisp I wrote).

Another example is the really weird compilation chain: countless serious people have weighed in here, I’ll elide all the classics because most people making these arguments have their own favorite language and they’ve all been on HN dozens of times, but a custom assembly language is a weird thing to have done, almost no one outside the hardcore golang community thinks it’s sane, the problems is creates for build systems and FFI and just everything about actually running the stuff are completely unnecessary: there are other IRs, not all of them are LLVM IR if you’ve got some beef with LLVM IR, and given that go doesn’t seriously target FFI as more than a weird black sheep (cgo) there’s, ya know, assembly language. It’s a parting shot from the Plan9 diehards with the industrial clout to make it stick.

The garbage collection story is getting better but it’s an acknowledged handicap in a MxN threading model context, it’s not a secret or controversial even among the maintainers. See the famous “Two Knobs” talk.

Raw pointers, sum types, dependency management, build, generics that never get there, FFI: solved problem after solved problem killed by pocket veto, explained away, minimized, all with mega-bucks, quiet as a gopher corporate sponsorship fighting a Cold War against Sun and the JVM that doesn’t exist anymore marketed by appealing to the worst instincts of otherwise unimpeachable luminaries of computing.

There is great software written in golang by engineers I aspire to as role models (TailScale and Brad respectively as maybe the best example). I had to get serious about learning golang and how to work around its ideologically-motivated own-goals because I got serious about WebRTC and Pion (another great piece of software). But it sucks. I dread working on that part of the stack.

Go enums do suck, but that’s because we pay a very heavy price for golang being mainstream at all: we’ve thrown away ZooKeeper and engineer-millennia of garbage-collector work and countless other treasures, it sucks oxygen out of the room on more plausible C successors like D and Jai and Nim and Zig and V and (it pains me to admit but it’s true) Rust.

Yes there is great software in golang, tons of it. Yes there are iconic legends who are passionate about it, yes it brought new stuff to the party and the mainstream.

But the cost was too high.

It seems to be userspace accessible: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/66450

Something you should keep in mind regarding maps in Go. They don't shrink after elements are deleted runtime: shrink map as elements are deleted #20135

One of the checkers in golangci-lint does this. I forget which one.

golangci-lint rolls up lot of linters and checkers into a single binary.

There is a config file too.

https://github.com/golangci/golangci-lint

golangci-lint is an amazing open-source tool for CI in Go projects. Basically, it's an aggregator and a Go linters runner that makes life easier for developers. It includes all the well-known liners by default but also provides an easy way to integrate new ones.

Fun fact: We actually use a code linter via golangci-linter to catch misspellings in code/comments using client9/misspell.

The "standard linter" in Go is https://golangci-lint.run/ , which includes [1] the absolutely-vital errcheck which will do that for you.

For an Advent of Code challenge you may want to turn off a lot of other things, since the linter is broadly tuned for production, public code by default and you're creating burner code and don't care whether or not you have godoc comments for your functions, for instance. But I suggest using golangci-lint rather than errcheck directly because there's some other things you may find useful, like ineffassign, exportloopref, etc.

[1]: https://golangci-lint.run/usage/linters/

golangci-lint recently integrated go-check-sumtype. I recommend using golangci-lint as a pre-commit hook, but if you're in a real hurry you can replace "go build" with a shell script that runs go-check-sumtype instead. This is probably better than a weird hack, not that you're saying that the weird hack is a good idea anyhow.

Golangci-lint is a tool for checking Go code quality, finding issues, bugs, and style problems. It helps keep the code clean and maintainable.

This is such an infuriating problem. I'm convinced I'm using Go wrong, because I simply can't understand how this doesn't make it a toy language. Why the $expletive am I wasting 20-30 and more minutes per week of my life looking for the source of an error!?

Have you seen https://github.com/tomarrell/wrapcheck? It's a linter than does a fairly good job of warning when an error originates from an external package but hasn't been wrapped in your codebase to make it unique or stacktraced. It comes with https://github.com/golangci/golangci-lint and can even be made part of your in-editor LSP diagnostics.

But still, it's not perfect. And so I remain convinced that I'm misunderstanding something fundamental about the language because not being able to consistently find the source of an error is such an egregious failing for a programming language.