post: trying golang

[metaist]

Completed https://go.dev/tour/

• most of the syntax feels pretty familiar
• capitalize first letter to make a member public (no keyword); interesting choice, will take a little typing to get used to
• can initialize variables in if and switch similar to for; variables exist only within scope
• defer is nice for all kinds of cleanup (close file, mutex unlock); can modify named return values
• lack of classes first seems weird, but then brilliant (no resolution order wildness)
• have pointers (efficient), but no pointer arithmetic (excellent)
• implicit interfaces-- yes, like they should be
• generics feel a little bolted on (because they are), but make sense
• goroutines are interesting and seem high-performance
• channels seem better than queues

[metaist]

https://go.dev/doc/code

• go install makes a binary and puts it in $HOME/go/bin (hello world is 1.9 MB!)
• go fmt uses tabs! (meh, it's the language standard and I can edit my .editorconfig)
• go mod tidy when you add new dependencies
• go test runs the lightweight test framework (How do I get coverage?)

[metaist]

https://go.dev/doc/effective_go

• Written in 2009, not updated for all the new stuff, but it's largely conventions, so it's fine.
• .X() for the getter of .x and .SetX() to be its setter.
• interfaces end in -er (Reader, Writer, etc.)
• uses MixedCaps or mixedCaps
• automatic semicolon insertion; no braces on newlines by themselves (yay!)
• switch as idiomatic long if-if else-else; can have comma-separated lists for cases
• can break to a label (like in js)
• "Arrays are values. Assigning one array to another copies all the elements."
• Usually don't pass arrays around, use slices.
• Not sure why I didn't get that runes have single quotes; like char in C
• What is iota?
  • https://go.dev/wiki/Iota
  • It's a thing that gets reset to zero every time there's const and is incremented for every non-blank, non-comment line by one
  • basically an easy way to enumerate enums by using const
• there are forms of "type casting" that don't create new values (e.g., type Sequence []int can be "cast" to []int(s) because we're just pretending it's a different type)
• you can rename import (I was wondering how that worked)
• you can embed interfaces within other interfaces
• you can make the union of structs by having a pointer to the name of the interface, but not naming the fields
• embedding is somewhat cleaner than subclassing; method calls to the inner get the inner type, not the outer type
• concurrency is not parallelism: https://go.dev/blog/waza-talk
  • ok, but concurrency enabled parallelism
• has a built-in templating language

[metaist]

https://go.dev/doc/comment

• kinda like markdown, but a few gotchas

[metaist]

https://gobyexample.com/worker-pools

• this makes a lot of sense to me
• the channels really are better than queues

I was surprised this syntax didn't work:

for r := range out {
    fmt.Println("Got result:", r)
}

Meaning, it ran until the out channel was out of things to do and then crashed.

[metaist]

Are there optional arguments? Nope and no overloading either. https://go.dev/doc/faq#overloading

[metaist]

Is there an equivalent of Python's range (formerly xrange)? Not really. Just use for.

[metaist]

Is there an equivalent of yield? No. Just use channels. https://go.dev/talks/2013/go4python.slide#20

[metaist]

Even cleaner: https://go.dev/talks/2013/go4python.slide#21

[metaist]

https://gobyexample.com/