One year after switching from Java to Go

> But there are obviously work around solutions in the Go ecosystem. It uses the Context ctx, which we pass around functions in order to juggle data around in the application.

Man. This works. The context API allows/enables it. But I’d really recommend against passing data to functions via context. The biggest selling point of Go to me is that I can usually just look at anyone’s code and know what it’s doing, but this breaks down when data is hidden inside a context. Dependency injection is entirely possible without using the context package at all, interfaces are great for it.

I hit this point in tfa and had the same comment. Please don’t pass things around in a Comtext. Maybe stash a slog logger in there, but that’s about it.

I made the switch to Go a few years ago. For those who are on a similar journey as the author, or the author himself, I suggest spending time with the Go standard library and tools written by Rob Pike and Russ Cox to get a handle on idiomatic Go.

It’s clear the author still thinks in Java, not go. Saying Context ctx for example instead of ctx context.Context. Also DI, which is arguably not necessary at all in Go given how elegantly interfaces work.

I spent quite a lot of time using wire for DI in go only to really study the code it was generating and realizing it truly is code I would normally just write myself.

Edit:

Regarding stack traces, it turns out you don’t need them. I strongly suggest a top level error handler in Go combined with a custom error struct that records the file and line the error was first seen in your code. Then wrap the error as many times as you want to annotate additional lines as the error is handled up to the top level, but only that first point in our own code is what actually matters nearly all of the time.

I’m yet to see a former Java developer who uses the idioms of the language they currently use. They all just write Java in a different language.