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Comment by herval | Hacker News Reader

I keep shooting myself in the foot _the same way_, all the time - and it's incredibly easy to do so:

- not knowing if "Foo" being returned is a struct or an interface, so you're not sure if you should "if foo != nil" (it could not be nil if it's a struct)

- channels freezing (specially unbuffered ones). I still can't figure out how to debug those well.

- (the most common of all) spawning goroutines on a for loop, and all of them closuring over the same value (instead of one per item on the loop)

it's a surprising amount of sharp edges, for such a tiny language...

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1. Get IDE support. There is no convention of adding a suffix like "Interface", and I personally am very happy with this. C# ISomething naming conventions have annoyed me quite a bit.

2. Always limit the scope of your channels. I like using unidirectional channels with structs that have more unidirectional channels. (For instance, a chan of workRequest{workData, returnChan} where return chan only receives responses for this request and is closed when no values are left)

3. I think you've been treated to well by JS closures, always hand over arguments you're going to use in the goroutine, this also allows the CG to clean up the stack of the function that started the closure goroutine.

1. Naming conventions don’t solve syntax warts. Modern languages solve this as part of their null safety (eg optional monads or the ? on kotlin and swift)

2. Yes, I know how to “properly” do it. Does not eliminate human error.

3. Closures in any other language, afaik. I rarely code in Js, fyi

Regarding 1, I (and seemingly everyone else writing libraries) usually return (value, error) and treat a nil value as error. We have quite a bit of old code at work that might segfault because it wasn't done like this.

Most of our Kubernetes code looks something like this

    _, err := clientInterface.Update(object)
    if err != nil {
      if machinery_errors.IsNotFound(err) {
        //handle nil case
      } else
        // handle unexpected case
      }
    }

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