Go's full of hacks, and holds no shame over it. Zero-initialized everything, and proceeding to 'defer' instead of RAII, generic builtin types despite lack of generics (until recently), no builtin list type, slices having capacity...
This was Go's design philosophy until Rob Pike left - to do the simple thing simply and not try to be clever about it.
It’s not simple though. The language is simpler, sure. But you pay for language simplicity with program complexity. In go, you have to write and debug a lot more code.
I don’t mind spending a few extra weeks learning a more complex language if doing so saves me months of time down the track programming and debugging. That is an excellent investment.
I've not seen this in my experience tbh, the extra code that Go requires is ugly but not complex, the lack of ergonomics actively discourages "clever" solutions and, as a result of this, people tend to write the kind of straightforward code that doesn't end up needing lengthy programming or intense debugging.
At my workplace we've used many languages over the years (C#, Python, Go) and Go teams are the ones that by far do the least amount of yak shaving and have the most intelligible codebases.
It’s the lack of parametric enums (sum types) which really gets me. I use sum types constantly. Nearly as often as I use structs.
For example, in typescript you can define a json value as something like:
type JSON = null | bool | string | number | [JSON] | {[k:string]: JSON}
Go forces me to reach for interface {}, and use a nest of dynamic dispatch code. It’s horrible. Go code is harder to write, harder to read and it runs slower as a result.
The decision is baffling. Especially given go now has generics, which are waaay more complex than enums. And sum types in go could be used to fix the constant (result | error) boilerplate. And remove nullability. Sigh.
100% also our experience. We have an internal CLI which has grown to almost half a million lines of Go, mostly contributed to by first-time gophers (and agents nowadays), and with relatively little work spent on making sure the core entities and interfaces encourage doing the right thing, the entire codebase is still surprisingly readable and free of unexpected behaviors.
Yep. But with go 1.22/1.23 and later this is changing. It's becoming a hell of a mess like many other big languages. I think it was two consecutive releases back in 2024 where they added for ... range and generics? That was when I gave up.
Sad that the one language that managed to occupy that nice spot in language design space for an extended period of time, isn't doing so anymore.
Of course, you can actively restrict yourself to standard go, but not needing to do that was the whole point.
The support for iterators is relatively new, though being limited to data structures that an iterator makes sense on, they don't exactly get around in the language and pollute everything everywhere.
The support for generics is years old and I don't believe anyone who claims it has ruined the language. I've barely encountered them in the wild and I've never encountered the thing people were really worried about in the wild where something has 4 generic parameters that are themselves complicated generic parameters of other things. If you're encountering that, it is either some one-off library I've never encountered, or it's because you or your team are writing it, to which the solution is, stop that.
I'm not even sure I've yet seen a "generic" in a library in Go that isn't simply straight up a generic data structure, the core use case for generics. I've written a couple of such things but they're all internal code.
Wait, which thing do you mean by a "list type" ? A growable array type like Rust's Vec<T> or C++ std::vector<T> or the ArrayList type seen in several languages ?
Or do you mean a linked list type akin to C++ std::list or std::forward_list or Rust's std::collections::LinkedList ?
"List" is vague, which is appropriate if you're talking about very high level abstractions where it doesn't matter how it works and 5 gigabytes, 5 bits, 5 weeks or 5 seconds are all finite so who cares - but in the real world we usually do care.
Yeah, I really don't see much of a reason for Go to get a first-party linked list type. In most cases in non-list-oriented languages the performance and ergonomics are awful compared to a competent growable array type, the mechanical sympathy of "real" linked lists is generally terrible.
Plus they're extremely easy to build if you truly have a good use for one, particularly with generics.
RAII has the advantage that you can't forget to do it, but defer has the advantage that you can handle failure in ways other than panicking. Of course, in many cases (e.g. closing a file), there's generally not much you can do anyway even if you want to handle the error directly, but at least it's possible.
Code which writes to files and doesn't check for errors on close is subtly incorrect, although my understanding is that kernel devs bend over backwards to make failure unlikely, probably because everybody does it incorrectly anyway.
Not that it matters, but fclose() doesn't happen in the kernel, so the kernel devs can't do anything about it. All libcs have essentially the same implementation:
- is fp NULL or already already closed? return error
- call fflush() and return error if it fails (fflush also happens in userland, it does a seek() then a write() of the userland buffer)
- call close() and return error if it fails
close() follows essentially the same process inside the kernel: check fd is valid, call flush() (this time truly to disk), close it.
Sure, you can just ignore errors entirely, and this is what Rust actually does today, at least for std::fs::File. The only other option within RAII that I can think of is that you can mutate some external, longer-lived state.
The primary way to deal with error-on-clean-up in RAII languages is to not rely exclusively on RAII for it. Rust's File type, for example, has sync_data and sync_all methods (which, to be fair, only even need to be called for writable file handles). I don't think there's anything wrong with this approach, but it ends up being just as explicit and therefore forgettable as defer.
It should be noted that you can (at least in Rust) actually implement defer using RAII; see e.g. the scopeguard crate. Since RAII is block-scoped, this defer is also block-scoped (like Zig) rather than function-scoped (like Go).
Rust uses affine types, which means that the compiler guarantees that you clean resources (call the destructor) either zero, or one time. If you call it zero times, then the compiler inserts the call to the destructor for you, in which case there is no opportunity to handle errors in the cleanup, so the result is they are ignored (or you get some kind of panic)
A system that is based on linear types would have an advantage here. In a linear type system, the compiler guarantees that you always call the cleanup function (destructor) exactly once. With such a system, you can have the destructor return an error result, and since the call will always be explicitly written in the code (rather than generated automatically by the compiler), there will always be an explicit errorn handling code branch.
More like Pike's design philosophy was "let's do some half-thought things and sabotage any current or future improvement proposal for decades to come, while gaslighting everyone that Go is good because Google and because people can't see difference between 'systems' and 'system' programming".
Comments
Go's full of hacks, and holds no shame over it. Zero-initialized everything, and proceeding to 'defer' instead of RAII, generic builtin types despite lack of generics (until recently), no builtin list type, slices having capacity...
This was Go's design philosophy until Rob Pike left - to do the simple thing simply and not try to be clever about it.
It’s not simple though. The language is simpler, sure. But you pay for language simplicity with program complexity. In go, you have to write and debug a lot more code.
I don’t mind spending a few extra weeks learning a more complex language if doing so saves me months of time down the track programming and debugging. That is an excellent investment.
I've not seen this in my experience tbh, the extra code that Go requires is ugly but not complex, the lack of ergonomics actively discourages "clever" solutions and, as a result of this, people tend to write the kind of straightforward code that doesn't end up needing lengthy programming or intense debugging.
At my workplace we've used many languages over the years (C#, Python, Go) and Go teams are the ones that by far do the least amount of yak shaving and have the most intelligible codebases.
I’ve always felt like the lack of many complex language features nudges teams to also keep their code simple.
There is always two aspects to a language works in practice: how it formally works, and how the community uses it.
Go is (was?) simple, and also (encouraged by the language and influence from its developers) the community mostly aims to keep the usage simple.
It’s the lack of parametric enums (sum types) which really gets me. I use sum types constantly. Nearly as often as I use structs.
For example, in typescript you can define a json value as something like:
Go forces me to reach for interface {}, and use a nest of dynamic dispatch code. It’s horrible. Go code is harder to write, harder to read and it runs slower as a result.The decision is baffling. Especially given go now has generics, which are waaay more complex than enums. And sum types in go could be used to fix the constant (result | error) boilerplate. And remove nullability. Sigh.
100% also our experience. We have an internal CLI which has grown to almost half a million lines of Go, mostly contributed to by first-time gophers (and agents nowadays), and with relatively little work spent on making sure the core entities and interfaces encourage doing the right thing, the entire codebase is still surprisingly readable and free of unexpected behaviors.
It's hard and annoying to read though. Constantly beating around the bush, circling the point but not stating it, not unlike LLM prose.
Yep. But with go 1.22/1.23 and later this is changing. It's becoming a hell of a mess like many other big languages. I think it was two consecutive releases back in 2024 where they added for ... range and generics? That was when I gave up.
Sad that the one language that managed to occupy that nice spot in language design space for an extended period of time, isn't doing so anymore.
Of course, you can actively restrict yourself to standard go, but not needing to do that was the whole point.
The support for iterators is relatively new, though being limited to data structures that an iterator makes sense on, they don't exactly get around in the language and pollute everything everywhere.
The support for generics is years old and I don't believe anyone who claims it has ruined the language. I've barely encountered them in the wild and I've never encountered the thing people were really worried about in the wild where something has 4 generic parameters that are themselves complicated generic parameters of other things. If you're encountering that, it is either some one-off library I've never encountered, or it's because you or your team are writing it, to which the solution is, stop that.
I'm not even sure I've yet seen a "generic" in a library in Go that isn't simply straight up a generic data structure, the core use case for generics. I've written a couple of such things but they're all internal code.
I'm coming to think there's a selection effect here. The people that want to write complex code feel unsupported by Go and avoid it.
Yep. I'd much rather 50 lines of rust than 100 lines of go. I find shorter programs to be generally easier to read and more likely to be correct.
This is good for Go ecosystem!
So… what language do you use?
No (useful) language is simple. Claiming go is not simple without naming a language for comparison is a party foul.
Rust. Typescript. More complex languages let me write shorter, simpler programs.
I don't write haskell, but I understand the appeal. Haskell is this philosophy taken to its natural conclusion.
Wait, which thing do you mean by a "list type" ? A growable array type like Rust's Vec<T> or C++ std::vector<T> or the ArrayList type seen in several languages ?
Or do you mean a linked list type akin to C++ std::list or std::forward_list or Rust's std::collections::LinkedList ?
"List" is vague, which is appropriate if you're talking about very high level abstractions where it doesn't matter how it works and 5 gigabytes, 5 bits, 5 weeks or 5 seconds are all finite so who cares - but in the real world we usually do care.
Yeah, I really don't see much of a reason for Go to get a first-party linked list type. In most cases in non-list-oriented languages the performance and ergonomics are awful compared to a competent growable array type, the mechanical sympathy of "real" linked lists is generally terrible.
Plus they're extremely easy to build if you truly have a good use for one, particularly with generics.
It doesn't matter which one you mean, because Go has neither of them.
RAII has the advantage that you can't forget to do it, but defer has the advantage that you can handle failure in ways other than panicking. Of course, in many cases (e.g. closing a file), there's generally not much you can do anyway even if you want to handle the error directly, but at least it's possible.
If closing a file fails then you treat it the same as how you would treat a write failure:
Code which writes to files and doesn't check for errors on close is subtly incorrect, although my understanding is that kernel devs bend over backwards to make failure unlikely, probably because everybody does it incorrectly anyway.Not that it matters, but fclose() doesn't happen in the kernel, so the kernel devs can't do anything about it. All libcs have essentially the same implementation:
- is fp NULL or already already closed? return error
- call fflush() and return error if it fails (fflush also happens in userland, it does a seek() then a write() of the userland buffer)
- call close() and return error if it fails
close() follows essentially the same process inside the kernel: check fd is valid, call flush() (this time truly to disk), close it.
Rust can handle that with RAII without panicking just fine. And not only Rust..
Sure, you can just ignore errors entirely, and this is what Rust actually does today, at least for std::fs::File. The only other option within RAII that I can think of is that you can mutate some external, longer-lived state.
The primary way to deal with error-on-clean-up in RAII languages is to not rely exclusively on RAII for it. Rust's File type, for example, has sync_data and sync_all methods (which, to be fair, only even need to be called for writable file handles). I don't think there's anything wrong with this approach, but it ends up being just as explicit and therefore forgettable as defer.
It should be noted that you can (at least in Rust) actually implement defer using RAII; see e.g. the scopeguard crate. Since RAII is block-scoped, this defer is also block-scoped (like Zig) rather than function-scoped (like Go).
Rust uses affine types, which means that the compiler guarantees that you clean resources (call the destructor) either zero, or one time. If you call it zero times, then the compiler inserts the call to the destructor for you, in which case there is no opportunity to handle errors in the cleanup, so the result is they are ignored (or you get some kind of panic)
A system that is based on linear types would have an advantage here. In a linear type system, the compiler guarantees that you always call the cleanup function (destructor) exactly once. With such a system, you can have the destructor return an error result, and since the call will always be explicitly written in the code (rather than generated automatically by the compiler), there will always be an explicit errorn handling code branch.
More like Pike's design philosophy was "let's do some half-thought things and sabotage any current or future improvement proposal for decades to come, while gaslighting everyone that Go is good because Google and because people can't see difference between 'systems' and 'system' programming".