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I tell folks that working in Go is like coming full-circle to C again. It is the easiness of Go, the general presentation of good ole shoot-yourself-in-the-foot

I tell folks that working in Go is like coming full-circle to C again. It is the easiness of Go, the general presentation of good ole shoot-yourself-in-the-foot pointers, and even the presence of interface{} as an analog of void*, that causes the link in my mind. As many of you know, the Go community has been having a knock-down drag-out argument over whether/how generics should be added to the language. I joked a bit about this, but I am serious in my contention that much of the value proposition I see of Go over Java would be wiped away if a feature that complex gets bolted onto it.

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jerf 7y ago
"the general presentation of good ole shoot-yourself-in-the-foot pointers... presence of interface{} as an analog of void*" Go doesn't have "shoot yourself in the foot" pointers. For that, you need pointer arithmetic, and Go doesn't have that. (Outside of the "unsafe" library.) interface{} may be an analog of void∗, but it lacks the failure in C where casting something to void∗ loses all type information; in Go, if you put an "string" into an interface{}, the runtime still knows it's a "string" and you can't put it into any sort of strongly typed variable except a string. The runtime/virtual machine Go implements knows the types of all values at all times. I really wish the Go designers had called their pointers "references". Considered across the entire landscape of what various programming languages call "pointers" and "references", there's substantial overlap but I think Go's pointers are closer to the center of the "references" cluster than the "pointers" one.
- phlakaton 7y ago
  Not shootable in the foot in terms of pointer arithmetic, but shootable in the foot in terms of unchecked dereferences of nil. As a C++ programmer historically, I think of references as not being nilable.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    AKA has 'pointers' but not in a way that adds value.

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jerf 7y ago

"the general presentation of good ole shoot-yourself-in-the-foot pointers... presence of interface{} as an analog of void*" Go doesn't have "shoot yourself in the foot" pointers. For that, you need pointer arithmetic, and Go doesn't have that. (Outside of the "unsafe" library.) interface{} may be an analog of void∗, but it lacks the failure in C where casting something to void∗ loses all type information; in Go, if you put an "string" into an interface{}, the runtime still knows it's a "string" and you can't put it into any sort of strongly typed variable except a string. The runtime/virtual machine Go implements knows the types of all values at all times. I really wish the Go designers had called their pointers "references". Considered across the entire landscape of what various programming languages call "pointers" and "references", there's substantial overlap but I think Go's pointers are closer to the center of the "references" cluster than the "pointers" one.

phlakaton 7y ago
Not shootable in the foot in terms of pointer arithmetic, but shootable in the foot in terms of unchecked dereferences of nil. As a C++ programmer historically, I think of references as not being nilable.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  AKA has 'pointers' but not in a way that adds value.