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Go channels are bad

(www.jtolds.com)
298 points jtolds | 2 comments | 02 Mar 16 15:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.404s | source
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Jabbles ◴[02 Mar 16 16:02 UTC] No.11210740[source]▶
Effective Go has always said:

Do not communicate by sharing memory; instead, share memory by communicating.

This approach can be taken too far. Reference counts may be best done by putting a mutex around an integer variable, for instance.

https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#sharing

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api ◴[02 Mar 16 16:33 UTC] No.11210978[source]▶
I thought Go had gc. Why would you ever need reference counts?
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1. chrsm ◴[02 Mar 16 17:14 UTC] No.11211294[source]▶
Example: Recently built a small service that responds to requests and walks various files looking for data.

The service can be asked to unload (close) the file, but it's hard to say whether it's in-use at the time without some kind of reference count to current requests using the file.

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2. nly ◴[02 Mar 16 17:20 UTC] No.11211343[source]▶
That's kinda what dup() is for. Reference counting happens in the kernel.