Sometimes I think Go was specifically made for Google to dictate its own preferences on the rest of us like some kind of power play. It enforces one single style of programming too much.

[–] philm@programming.dev 17 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Is this a hard error? Like it doesn't compile at all?

Isn't there something like #[allow(unused)] in Rust you can put over the declaration?

[–] flame3244@lemmy.world 27 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Yes it is a hard error and Go does not compile then. You can do _ = foobar to fake variable usage. I think this is okay for testing purposes.

[–] nomadjoanne@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ew, that's awful. Go is not one of my programming languages but I had always held it in high esteem because Ken Thompson and Rob Pike were involved in it.

[–] flame3244@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Honestly, it does not happen often that I have a ln unused variable that I want to keep. In my mind it is the same thing when wanting to call a function that does not exists. Also my editor is highlighting error Long before I try to compile, so this is fine too for me.

[–] AstridWipenaugh@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

The underscore is used in production code too. It's a legitimate way to tell the compiler to discard the object because you don't intend to use the pointer/value.

[–] HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Never really coded in Go outside of trying it out, but as far as I know it's a hard error.

[–] space_comrade@hexbear.net 17 points 2 years ago (2 children)

From what I've heard from Google employees Google is really stringent with their coding standards and they usually limit what you can do with the language. Like for C++ they don't even use half the fancy features C++ offers you because it's hard to reason about them.

I guess that policy makes sense but I feel like it takes out all the fun out of the job.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 15 points 2 years ago

As far as C++ goes, that's probably the only sane way to use the language.

[–] Sloogs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Just about any place I know that uses C++ also does that with C++ so that's nothing unusual for C++ specifically. It's too big of a language to reason about very well if you don't, so you've gotta find a subset that works.

[–] skeletorsass@hexbear.net 1 points 2 years ago

Too many patterns. If you do not do this every author will have a different use of the language and you will have to read a book of documentation each time you change files.

[–] flame3244@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago

I think this is a good thing. The styles are just opinions anyway and forcing everyone to just follow a single style takes a lot of bikeshedding away, which I really like.