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What about Go makes it easy to manage and refactor large codebases? I don't do much Java, but whenever I've watched someone use Eclipse for refactoring, I ques

by alec 14y ago

What about Go makes it easy to manage and refactor large codebases? I don't do much Java, but whenever I've watched someone use Eclipse for refactoring, I question why I'm still using vim, because it is just magic and does everything for you.

chimeracoder 14y ago
I should probably write a blog post about this, because it's a combination of a number of things. Primarily, the compiler is incredibly strict and opinionated, so it's impossible to make certain small errors like assigning to lvalues that are never used, importing packages that are never used, etc. Secondarily, gofmt makes code very standardized and easy to skim. It takes Python's 'only one (obvious) way to do it' one or two steps further, by forcing everyone to to write their code the same way. This makes refactoring a lot easier because you don't need to read as much code each time in order to understand what's going on (or at least, you can mentally parse it much faster). Finally, the context-free grammar combined with a strong, static type system means that migrating code from an old (incompatible) version of Go to the most recent one can be done painlessly with the 'go fix' tool. This isn't your py2to3 tool - this accepts valid (old) Go code as input and reliably produces valid (up-to-date) Go code as the output. That last bit isn't actually used in refactoring manually, but I make note of it because very few languages give you anything close to this level of reliability with code modification, which speaks volumes about the design of the language's grammar.
- crypto5 14y ago
  But go ecosystem still doesn't have anything even close to refactoring abilities of Java/C# IDEs. Say, move Java class which is in use in 100s places from one package to another is just few mouse clicks in Eclipse and a lot of pain in case of Go.
  - 4ad 14y ago
    Not really. Go comes with code rewriting tools, unsurprisingly since they were used to update the standard library and 3rd party code when the language changed before Go 1. I don't want to use a language that doesn't come with a parser in the standard library anymore.
    - crypto5 14y ago
      So, is it possible to move/rename class/method/field smoothly using those tools? Extract code block to new method?
      - zemo 14y ago
        the gofmt tool has a replacement feature: `gofmt -r 'InitialName -> FinalName'`
        crypto5 14y ago
        Documentation looks quite incomplete(http://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/ http://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/). Will it change all imports and usages of class/method/field? Will it resolve all signature polymorphic calls?
        deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]

by alec 14y ago

chimeracoder 14y ago

I should probably write a blog post about this, because it's a combination of a number of things. Primarily, the compiler is incredibly strict and opinionated, so it's impossible to make certain small errors like assigning to lvalues that are never used, importing packages that are never used, etc. Secondarily, gofmt makes code very standardized and easy to skim. It takes Python's 'only one (obvious) way to do it' one or two steps further, by forcing everyone to to write their code the same way. This makes refactoring a lot easier because you don't need to read as much code each time in order to understand what's going on (or at least, you can mentally parse it much faster). Finally, the context-free grammar combined with a strong, static type system means that migrating code from an old (incompatible) version of Go to the most recent one can be done painlessly with the 'go fix' tool. This isn't your py2to3 tool - this accepts valid (old) Go code as input and reliably produces valid (up-to-date) Go code as the output. That last bit isn't actually used in refactoring manually, but I make note of it because very few languages give you anything close to this level of reliability with code modification, which speaks volumes about the design of the language's grammar.

crypto5 14y ago
But go ecosystem still doesn't have anything even close to refactoring abilities of Java/C# IDEs. Say, move Java class which is in use in 100s places from one package to another is just few mouse clicks in Eclipse and a lot of pain in case of Go.
- 4ad 14y ago
  Not really. Go comes with code rewriting tools, unsurprisingly since they were used to update the standard library and 3rd party code when the language changed before Go 1. I don't want to use a language that doesn't come with a parser in the standard library anymore.
  - crypto5 14y ago
    So, is it possible to move/rename class/method/field smoothly using those tools? Extract code block to new method?
    - zemo 14y ago
      the gofmt tool has a replacement feature: `gofmt -r 'InitialName -> FinalName'`
      - crypto5 14y ago
        Documentation looks quite incomplete(http://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/ http://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/). Will it change all imports and usages of class/method/field? Will it resolve all signature polymorphic calls?
        deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]