One year after switching from Java to Go

I've been using Go for a while now. The biggest headache is error handling. I don't care what the "experts" say, having exception handling is so, so, so much cleaner in terms of error handling. Checking for err is simply bad, and trickling errors back up the call stack is one of the dumbest experiences in programming I've endured in multi-decades. If they are willing to add generics, they should add exception handling as well.

Maybe go just isn’t for you? It really doesn’t need every feature of other languages. The error handling is ideal for me, better than any other language. You are always explicit, with every function call, about “what could happen if this fails?”

Maybe passing it up the stack is the best way to handle it, but also maybe it’s better to handle it somewhere in the middle.

The thing that always happens with exceptions in API projects I’ve worked on, is that exceptions can come from any level of the stack, then by default it skips everything in the middle, and the controller has default handlers for what to do in case of an exception.

If there are exceptions you didn’t know existed because of some library or just complex code with dozens of possible exceptions? They still end up being handled in your controller. You need to know exactly what exceptions could happen at every level of the stack, and how to handle it, otherwise everything just short circuits.

With the go errors, you only need to know “did this function call work? If not, then what?”

Exceptions are a terrible idea.

However, I strongly prefer rust error handling to Go.

go:

   (res, err) := foo()
   if err != nil
       return err
   (res, err) := bar(res)
   if err != …

Equivalent rust:

   let res = bar(foo)?)?;

I think go should add the ? sigil or something equivalently terse.

Ignoring all the extra keystrokes, I write “if err == nil” about 1% of the time, and then spend 30 minutes debugging it. That typo is not possible in idiomatic rust.

99% of people who never written go will know what the go version does