Comment by bilbo-b-baggins
4 days ago
4 ways to demonstrate that the author either knows nothing about closures, structs, mutexes, and atomicity OR they just come from a Rust background and made some super convoluted examples to crap on Go.
“A million ways to segfault in C” and its just the author assigning NULL to a pointer and reading it, then proclaiming C would be better if it didn’t have a NULL value like Rust.
I’m mad I read that. I want a refund on my time.
First sentence:
>I have been writing production applications in Go for a few years now. I like some aspects of Go. One aspect I do not like is how easy it is to create data races in Go.
Their examples don't seem terribly convoluted to me. In fact, Uber's blog post is quite similar: https://www.uber.com/blog/data-race-patterns-in-go/
To me it looks like simple, clear examples of potential issues. It's unfortunate to frame that as "crapping on Go", how are new Go programmers going to learn about the pitfalls if all discussion of them are seen as hostility?
Like, rightly or wrongly, Go chose pervasive mutability and shared memory, it inevitably comes with drawbacks. Pretending they don't exist doesn't make them go away.
Go famously summed up their preferred approach to shared state:
> Don't communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating.
Which they then failed to follow, especially since goroutines share memory with each other.
7 replies →
Concurrent programming is hard and has many pitfalls; people are warned about this from the very, very start. If you then go about it without studying proper usage/common pitfalls and do not use (very) defensive coding practices (violated by all examples) then the main issue is just naivity. No programming language can really defend against that.
You are completely dismissing language design.
Also, these are minimal reproducers, the exact same mistakes can trivially happen in larger codebases across multiple files, where you wouldn't notice them immediately.
The whole point of not using C is that such pitfalls shouldn't compile in other languages.
> Pretending they don't exist doesn't make them go away.
It's generally assumed that people who defend their favorite programming language are oblivious to the problems the language has or choose to ignore these problems to cope with the language.
There's another possibility: Knowing the footguns and how to avoid them well. This is generally prevalent in (Go/C/C++) vs. Rust discussions. I for one know the footguns, I know how bad it can be, and I know how to avoid them.
Liking a programming language as is, operating within its safe-envelope and pushing this envelope with intent and care is not a bad thing. It's akin to saying that using a katana is bad because you can cut yourself.
We know, we accept, we like the operating envelope of the languages we use. These are tools, and no tool is perfect. Using a tool knowing its modus operandi is not "pretending the problems don't exist".
> Using a tool knowing its modus operandi is not "pretending the problems don't exist".
I said that in response to the hostility ("crap on Go") towards the article. If such articles aren't written, how will newbies learn about the pitfalls in the first place?
While I agree with you in principle, there is a small but important caveat about large codebases with hundreds of contributors or more. It only takes 1 bad apple to ruin the bunch.
I'll always love a greenfield C project, though!
During the short time I was working on a Go project I spent a significant amount of time debugging an issue like the one described in his first example in a library we depended on, so it's definitely not a problem of “super convoluted example”.
I assume you are aware of "the billion dollar mistake" from Tony Hoare?