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Comment on How Go detects struct copies with sync.noCopyparent

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How is this simple? It's basically a hint to `go vet` that uses a special interface pattern. I'm baffled by what some people call "simple" lol

How much additional complexity do users need to be aware of when writing new code because of the way this was implemented? Adding new features makes the language bigger, for something that Claude tells me is used 20 times in total in the entire Go codebase.

I don't know the answer to those things, it feels like it's sort of on the one saying "This is simple" to explain why.

Because it doesn't expand the language and force the user to learn new features, it instead puts the ugliness deep in the library where nobody needs to interact with it.

This explicitly leverages a hidden "feature" of the language, which is how Sync impacts copying (rather unintuively). It leverages this to create an interface based on that hidden feature to create a marker that is consumed by a specific tool (not the compiler).

This feels like at least two layers of special behaviors.

What's "this", and what does the user need to learn to make use of it?

noCopy. In order to understand it, they have to learn that this is enforced only by `go vet` and that the marker relies on everything described in the `2. How go vet and noCopy work` section of this article.

Of course, they don't have to learn anything other than "use `go vet`, it's what enforces this" to use it. But that's true of almost anything?

It's the difference between trying to learn the language and trying to learn the implementation details of a library. Is the kind of crazy hack that Rust std uses to prevent TOCTOU attacks with symlinks a language complexity issue or not?

I suppose you can add features to the language and then tell people to avoid learning them.

Is the kind of crazy hack that Rust std uses to prevent TOCTOU attacks with symlinks a language complexity issue or not?

I have no clue what you're talking about and I doubt that it's relevant.

The claim was made that this is "simple". It doesn't feel simple to me. I'm asking about the criteria used and how this fits into that to justify the "simple" claim.

The implementation details of this construct are implementation details of the language.

The answer is that the implementation details are abstracted away by the library, the same way that the implementation details of Rust std::file access are abstracted away. That means that while the implementation may not be beautiful, the language doen't need to expand in order to accommodate 20 uses of the feature.

The language could be expanded to support this, but then every user either need to ignore a part of the language, or learn it. Oddball hacks in the internals of a library don't affect users of the library. This article is a deep dive into how the internals of a library happen to work on this iteration of Go.

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