6 ms·
The Go std library, as well as practically all go library code, is full of things that don't fully initialize all properties and things that nil-pointer-panic i
by TheDong 1mo ago
The Go std library, as well as practically all go library code, is full of things that don't fully initialize all properties and things that nil-pointer-panic if you hold them wrong, so no, no matter what you do you have to deal with this wart of Go.
The go type-system is simply incapable of enforcing nil-safety without being no longer able to compile the go stdlib nor most code in the wild, so it's a quite valid criticism of the go type-system and language, and your comment doesn't hit on a valid solution.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- 0x696C6961 1mo agoYou're painting a picture where people writing Go are constantly drowning in nil pointer panics. This is not reality. You hit them occasionally and they're trivial to understand and fix.
- thayne 1mo agonil pointer panics aren't nearly as bad as values getting zero initialized, then used in places that assume they were initialized, and getting subtle bugs because the state is inconsistent.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- win311fwg 1mo agoI always wonder how those types of mistakes make it through your test suite. You'd need some kind of non-deterministic path to reaching the unintended zero value — but it would need to be a non-deterministic path that you wouldn't make deterministic during testing. I think we'd be curious to see what that code looks like.
- 0x696C6961 1mo agoAgain, it happens, but the impact is wildly overstated. I get so confused with people saying "once it compiles, it probably works" (regardless of language). The problems I struggle with need invariants that can't be expressed by any modern language features.