I Don't Like Golang

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • prig

    Prig is for Processing Records In Go. Like AWK, but snobbish.

    My thoughts on his points, from someone who really likes Go and has used it heavily on small and large projects (1M LoC):

    1. Probably a matter of taste, but I love this feature, just because of the lack of noisy public/private keywords everywhere that you see in Java et al. It also means you can tell from a usage (not just the definition) that something is exported, which is often useful.

    As far as renaming goes, either rename the definition and see where the compiler complains, or get your IDE to do it (I use GoLand, but good things are said about gopls).

    As for his example, the idiomatic way to write that is either just call it `usr` or `adminUser`, or use `user := &user{}` which is valid (if a little confusing).

    2. This is a feature: it allows you to define interfaces only where you need them (on the consumer side), and you define the interface with only the methods you actually need. This means that when you add a bunch of new methods on the implementation, you don't need to change all the consumers. Go interfaces are amazing.

    The downside he discusses almost never happens: it's surprising, but even in large projects I've never had structs accidentally implementing interfaces or a IsAdmin method being implemented with reversed polarity by accident.

    3. Definitely has its downsides. Tooling helps find unchecked errors. Though I've found the biggest downside to explicit errors is the verbosity. You do get used to it, and the explicitness is at least clear.

    4. There are a couple of "magical" things like this, but they're well known and documented, and simple to fix if you run into them. I love the fact I can just name a file foo_test.go and add TestFoo methods, and "go test" finds them automatically.

    5. I have not found this to be the case, and in the rare cases it does happen, the compiler tells you loudly and it's easy to fix.

    6. Yeah, this is a slight pain, but the semi-official "imports" package (golang.org/x/tools/imports) fixes it up, so you just run generated code through that (and it auto-formats the code as well). It's a couple of lines of code. See: https://github.com/benhoyt/prig/blob/2df1b65a2bdf34c10bb5e57...

    7. Yeah, I wouldn't mind a ternary operator. Easily misused, which is why they didn't add it, but it would be really nice used judiciously, rather than the 4-line if-else block.

    8. Fixed by sort.Slice, which avoids the need for Len and Swap (and even more so by the new generics "slices" package, coming soon). I guess this was added after the article was written?

    9. Fixed by "Go modules", which is really well designed and works well (though opinions differ).

    10. Fixed with generics being added in Go 1.18. And generic helpers like "slices" and "maps" packages coming soon.

    11. Yeah, slightly annoying for newbies, though as he mentioned, tooling tells you. I do like the control you (can) get over allocation and memory management with Go slices.

    As far as his summary goes (eg: the type system getting in your way for large programs), I have definitely not found that to be the case. The author doesn't like Go, and that's okay! I don't like Java. :-)

  • FStar

    A Proof-oriented Programming Language

    I highly disagree with the interfaces criticism.

    Firstly You can literally just use one of the dozens of go lsps or code tools to search for API invocations to find what structs are passed/called into it. More importantly if you need to know you've written bad code. The entire point of an interface is that you SHOULDN'T need to know the underlying type. If you do you've violated the entire point. Just pass concrete ones. I've written Go for years and never had a problem with this, even in large open source projects like Kuberenetes.

    Secondly, the criticism about flipping return values order/meaning isn't a criticism of interface being structurally typed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_type_system). If you return int, int and the second int "should be even", you should have defined a type "Even" and returned int, Even*. Systems which are structurally typed can demonstrate functional extensionality and (https://github.com/FStarLang/FStar/wiki/SMT-Equality-and-Ext...) and check whether you've flipped the arguments, which would be a more valid criticism (but such checks are expensive and conflict with compile time requirements). Also Java has the same problem, if you define two interfaces with the same method signature and a single class implements both you can't disambiguate.

    Thirdly, the structural typing has a huge advantage, namely looser coupling and more tightly defined interfaces. If you follow the "accept interfaces return structs" go idiom, you'll see why. An open source library that does so leaves their returned structs open to be used by consumer code, that itself uses interfaces, without modification required. This means most go code has small, tightly defined interfaces, where every function on the interface is invoked in the relevant function.

    For example if you have a library with this definition:

    type Baz struct {}

    func (b Baz) Foo(){}

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  • goimports

    [mirror] Go Tools (by golang)

    Every major editor I can think of has a way to find what implements an interface using guru (https://github.com/golang/tools/tree/master/cmd/guru). In VSCode, it's right-click -> Find All Implementations. Using vim-go, it's :GoImplements. emacs has go-mode, which uses go-guru-implements.

  • go

    The Go programming language

    I just leave this here: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/49383

    After such public disregard to the communnity and contributors as a whole, the talk about good or bad has no meaning until they learn the basics. For example how to work with community, and the fact that you have to provide your phone number in order to fix urgent bug or implement some feature is a plain stupid(or rather malicious).

    Just imagine you've spent your free time working on the fix or feature, and instead of getting appreciation or sometimes bounty or just nothing, you're being "charged" to contribute. Yeah, they really think it's normal that contributors have to give up PI to the advertisement company that were accused of violating privacy many times before. They basically treat contributors, tech-savvy users who provide free labor, like their usual consumers. Just think about it for a second, this is insane.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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