this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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Rust
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The designers of Go actually discussed civilised error handling (like Rust and others), but in order to make it useful they'd have to include other features like ADTs and something like an
Either
monad (Result type), which they felt would make Go too difficult to learn for the developers they envisioned Go to be used by.One of the most important reasons for the popularity of Go is exactly that it is extremely limited, and can be picked up by any developer in a few hours. It takes no time to learn because there is nothing there that would need to be learned. This isn't a limitation, it's a feature (opinion of Go designers, not mine).
Jeeze, I knew that simplicity was the goal (and I think they largely succeeded in that), but that quote is so explicitly condescending. "They're not capable of understanding a brilliant language"?
I disagree slightly with the need to add full ADT support to the language to implement that style of error handling, because Pike et al. had no problem adding "special cases" to the language: in particular, return values are essentially tuples, but that's the only place in the language with that concept. So they wouldn't need to introduce user-definable enums and full pattern-matching to have better error handling. I can think of a couple approaches they could have used:
error
value in the return types, and it must be the last element in the "tuple"error
, the other values must be zero/nilnil
, discard it if so, return early if notswitch
statement to destructure it (akin to how type switches have their own bespoke syntax/keyword).