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Go's entire schtick is being simple, eschewing language complexity in favour of letting the programmer handle it themself. Like C, but with pointer safety and g
by stevecoalbear 1mo ago
Go's entire schtick is being simple, eschewing language complexity in favour of letting the programmer handle it themself. Like C, but with pointer safety and garbage collection.
We learned from C++ and Rust that languages can be so smart that people can't effectively use them. Go is the opposite. It's so dumb that anyone can use it, but it doesn't have some native language features you might want.
- insanitybit 1mo agoHow is this simple? It's basically a hint to `go vet` that uses a special interface pattern. I'm baffled by what some people call "simple" lol
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo agoHow much additional complexity do users need to be aware of when writing new code because of the way this was implemented? Adding new features makes the language bigger, for something that Claude tells me is used 20 times in total in the entire Go codebase.
- insanitybit 1mo agoI don't know the answer to those things, it feels like it's sort of on the one saying "This is simple" to explain why.
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo agoBecause it doesn't expand the language and force the user to learn new features, it instead puts the ugliness deep in the library where nobody needs to interact with it.
- insanitybit 1mo agoThis explicitly leverages a hidden "feature" of the language, which is how Sync impacts copying (rather unintuively). It leverages this to create an interface based on that hidden feature to create a marker that is consumed by a specific tool (not the compiler). This feels like at least two layers of special behaviors.
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo agoWhat's "this", and what does the user need to learn to make use of it?
- insanitybit 1mo agonoCopy. In order to understand it, they have to learn that this is enforced only by `go vet` and that the marker relies on everything described in the `2. How go vet and noCopy work` section of this article. Of course, they don't have to learn anything other than "use `go vet`, it's what enforces this" to use it. But that's true of almost anything?
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo agoIt's the difference between trying to learn the language and trying to learn the implementation details of a library. Is the kind of crazy hack that Rust std uses to prevent TOCTOU attacks with symlinks a language complexity issue or not? I suppose you can add features to the language and then tell people to avoid learning them.
- insanitybit 1mo ago> Is the kind of crazy hack that Rust std uses to prevent TOCTOU attacks with symlinks a language complexity issue or not? I have no clue what you're talking about and I doubt that it's relevant. The claim was made that this is "simple". It doesn't feel simple to me. I'm asking about the criteria used and how this fits into that to justify the "simple" claim. The implementation details of this construct are implementation details of the language.
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo agoThe answer is that the implementation details are abstracted away by the library, the same way that the implementation details of Rust std::file access are abstracted away. That means that while the implementation may not be beautiful, the language doen't need to expand in order to accommodate 20 uses of the feature. The language could be expanded to support this, but then every user either need to ignore a part of the language, or learn it. Oddball hacks in the internals of a library don't affect users of the library. This article is a deep dive into how the internals of a library happen to work on this iteration of Go.