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I don't disagree that it's consistent! Consistency and weirdness are separate dimensions; it's possible to be consistently weird, and IMO Go's pattern of return

I don't disagree that it's consistent! Consistency and weirdness are separate dimensions; it's possible to be consistently weird, and IMO Go's pattern of returning local-looking-but-actually-heap addresses is pretty weird, especially when you consider that they could have made return-by-value a transparently optimized move instead.

xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
It's only weird because you are expecting a local variable to not be on the heap. If local variables were always on the heap, you wouldn't notice. That's precisely what is happening here.
amscanne 4y ago
There is such thing as "local-looking" in Go. That's the point -- the compiler and runtime make the decisions as needed and the programmer doesn't care. (Obviously there are some consequences to this, wherein you may find yourself with heap-based allocation in hot paths that you didn't expect. But in terms of productivity, I think that not caring and having no distinction certainly reduces one thing that the programmer has to think about.) I think there would be analogous design decisions that remove various low-level concepts in many languages. For example, Python ints are arbitrary precision, which removes a whole set of concerns from the programmer. Rather than being "weird", I think this is just optimizing for a particular kind of programmer productivity.