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> If you really think Go NPEs are even a significant portion of Go reliability issues I'm gonna need more evidence. Don't get me wrong, there are many other Go

by cyphar 8y ago

> If you really think Go NPEs are even a significant portion of Go reliability issues I'm gonna need more evidence. Don't get me wrong, there are many other Go reliability issues. I just don't agree with hand-waving it away by saying that "you should have tested for it". I'm very in favour of testing (umoci is arguably the most rigorously-tested container image format tool, and it's written in Go) but I think that tests shouldn't be used as the solution for safety problems. The logical conclusion of such a view is that any language can be reasonably safe if you have enough tests -- and while this is true (just look at SQLite) it's hardly practical to replicate the degree of testing that SQLite does for every C project. In order for everyone to benefit, safety needs to be built in (and Go does have a lot of safety built in). > Go is not going to die some day because it's "not safe enough" You keep refuting claims I never made...

jchw 8y ago
The very first post I made in this thread was that I believe that this claim, that null is the biggest mistake in computer science, is way overblown. To this point, I bring up Go because Go is an example of a language where NPEs are basically a non-issue. There's not much to say there, if we still disagree on this point I'm not getting anywhere and I'm just going to give up. Following that logic, though, it feels inappropriate that null pointers have this ridiculous stigma compared to other runtime errors. Would anyone care about Rust if it's only promise were to get rid of null pointer errors? I'd argue if rust still had NPEs but effectively solved concurrency issues it would be exactly as popular today. I'm not claiming there's no value in alternatives to null. I am absolutely disputing the idea that null is the biggest mistake in computer science. Full stop, absolutely unconvinced. I can think of a lot of things I'd consider much worse. I still prefer more runtime safety over less, but there is a balance to be had too.

by cyphar 8y ago

jchw 8y ago

The very first post I made in this thread was that I believe that this claim, that null is the biggest mistake in computer science, is way overblown. To this point, I bring up Go because Go is an example of a language where NPEs are basically a non-issue. There's not much to say there, if we still disagree on this point I'm not getting anywhere and I'm just going to give up. Following that logic, though, it feels inappropriate that null pointers have this ridiculous stigma compared to other runtime errors. Would anyone care about Rust if it's only promise were to get rid of null pointer errors? I'd argue if rust still had NPEs but effectively solved concurrency issues it would be exactly as popular today. I'm not claiming there's no value in alternatives to null. I am absolutely disputing the idea that null is the biggest mistake in computer science. Full stop, absolutely unconvinced. I can think of a lot of things I'd consider much worse. I still prefer more runtime safety over less, but there is a balance to be had too.