Comment by bheadmaster

From the blog:

> There are two key drawbacks to this otherwise interesting and useful decision. First, Go can't have exceptions. Second, Go does not have the ability to synchronize tasks in real (wall clock) time. Both of these drawbacks stem from Go's emphasis on coroutines.

1) Go can't have exceptions? What exactly are panics, if not a peculiar implementation of exceptions? They print stack trace of the panicking goroutine, just like exceptions print stack traces of the thread they are thrown in. What exactly is the difference?

2) For real-time workloads, you can pin goroutine to an OS thread and use a spinlock. How does this make it different than in any other language?

> Since goroutine stacks are thus made disparate -- goroutines do not "share" common "ancestor" stack frames like Scheme's continuations do -- they can unwind their own stacks. However, this also means that when a goroutine is spawned, it has no memory of its parent, nor the parent for the child. This has already been noticed by other thinkers as a bad thing.

Goroutines are made to resemble lightweight threads. Maybe the author considers threads bad, but that's just a subjective opinion. But-- at the end of the blog, there's a sentence:

> OS threads provide some very nice constructs for programmers, and are hardened, battle-tested tools.

Goroutines provide almost exactly the same semantics as OS threads, so I don't really get what they're trying to say.

> Consider something of a converse scenario: Goroutine a spawns a goroutine b, without using an anonymous function this time. No closure, just a simple function spawn. Coroutine a opens a database connection. Goroutine b panics, crashing the program. The database connection is then left open as a zombie TCP connection.

On any sane OS, when the program crashes, the kernel closes the TCP connection - there is no such thing as a "zombie" TCP connection.

With all due respect to whoever the author is, I think this blogpost is full of crap.