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Problems with Go channels (2016)

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159 points mpweiher | 1 comments | 13 Apr 25 05:43 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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fpoling ◴[13 Apr 25 12:36 UTC] No.43672325[source]▶
I once read a book from 1982 that was arguing about CSP implementation in Ada that it lead to proliferation of threads (called tasks in Ada) and code complexity when mutex -based solutions were simpler.

Go implementations of CSP somewhat mitigated the problems raised in the book by supporting buffered channels, but even with that with CSP one end up with unnecessary tasks which also brings the problem of their lifetime management as the article mentioned.

replies(1): >>43672360 #
sapiogram ◴[13 Apr 25 12:42 UTC] No.43672360[source]▶
Unfortunately, Go also made their channels worse by having their nil semantics be complete lunacy. See the "channel API is inconsistent and just cray-cray" section in the article.
replies(1): >>43672748 #
chuckadams ◴[13 Apr 25 13:42 UTC] No.43672748[source]▶
The fact that Go requires a zero value for everything, including nil for objects like it was Java and the 1990's all over again, is one of the reasons I'm not particularly inclined to use Go for anything. Even PHP is non-nullable-by-default nowadays.
replies(3): >>43672857 #>>43673013 #>>43676795 #
NBJack ◴[13 Apr 25 13:59 UTC] No.43672857{3}[source]▶
Wait until you try refactoring in Go. Java has plenty of warts, but the explicit inheritance in it and other languages makes working across large codebases much simpler when you need to restructure something. Structural typing is surprisingly messy in practice.
replies(1): >>43672931 #
chuckadams ◴[13 Apr 25 14:09 UTC] No.43672931{4}[source]▶
I love structural typing, use it all day long in TypeScript, and wish every language had it. I've never run into issues with refactoring, though I suppose renaming a field in a type when the consumers are only matching by a literal shape might be less than 100% reliable. It looks like Go does support anonymous interfaces, but I'm not aware of how much they're actually used in real-world code (whereas in TS inlined object shapes are fairly common in trivial cases).
replies(2): >>43673092 #>>43676685 #
1. NBJack ◴[13 Apr 25 23:38 UTC] No.43676685{5}[source]▶
I have to trace structure and data handoffs across multiple projects sometimes that span multiple teams. I'm used to rather easily being able to find all instances of something using a thing, where something is originally defined, etc. I can't do that easily in Go due to the structural typing at times without either a very powerful IDE (JetBrains is the only one I know of that does Go well via Goland) or intimate knowledge of the project. It's surprisingly painful, and our tooling while not Jetbrains level is suppose to be some of the best out there. And Yahweh help me if I actually have to refactor.

I really doubt this comes up in smaller, one-team repos. But in the coding jungle I often deal with, I spend much more time tracing code because of this issue than I'drefactoring. Make no mistake: I like Go, but this irks me.