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Comment by nickcw | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, not allowing circular dependencies is a great design choice for building large programs. It forces you to separate your concerns properly.

If you get a circular dependency something is wrong with your design and the article does a good job on how to fix them.

I sometimes use function pointers which other packages override to fix circular dependencies which I don't think was mentioned in the article.

My only wish is that the go compiler gave more helpful output when you make a circular dependency. Currently it gives a list of all the packages involved in the loop which can be quite long, though generally it is the last thing you changed which caused the problem.

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In the abstract, I think I agree with you. But in reality, what I see is that go projects use far fewer packages than, say, programs in Java. Many go projects use one or two omnibus packages--principally, I expect, to avoid having to worry about circularity issues.

By forcing this design pattern on developers (something no other language does), I think the result has been overall worse code rather than better.

Perhaps a warning, rather than stop-the-compiler error would have been a better choice. Not sure.

Either way though, I wholly agree that the compiler gives too little information, which is curious because it knows the needed data and should easily be able to present it in a useful way.

I see the opposite in most Java programs: poor organization with packages based on a type of thing (eg models, controllers) rather than related behaviors.

Go doesn’t have warnings, which is great - if something is worth warning about, it is also worth erroring about. It never ceases to amaze me when a brand new JavaScript project spits out dozens of errors after pulling in a common library, and everyone thinks that is ok.

Of course Go has warnings.

It has go vet, which is not a linter, and according to the authors doesn't need comments to ignore checks, because the checks are always correct about you having written shitty code. Except where it might warn you about something completely outside your control.

Well then why not just integrate it into the compiler and make them errors?

> If you get a circular dependency something is wrong with your design

Packages not being able import from each other circularly is purely a compiler limitation. It says nothing about the realities of software development.

This notion stems from the idea that software design is inherently hierarchical, and that there is always a clear "higher level" and "lower level" between every possible software module.

What I've found in practice is that this is a fictional concept. Circularity between modules is very common and natural (especially as business requirements change over time). The workarounds people invent to avoid circularity literally always result in a codebase that is harder to understand and maintain, rather than easier.

> It forces you to separate your concerns properly.

Nah. It's not separation of concerns, it's separation of implementation. Two functions that in every other way shape and form deal directly with the same concepts, end up needing to be in separate modules purely because they differ in the functionality they import. And if later their imports change, they may need to be moved again. Which means implementation details are leaking into your design, which makes code less discoverable (since you now need to know implementation details in order to reasonably predict where a given function might be defined).

I prefer extremely fast compile times.

It's not fast if it fails every time you commented a line because a variable becomes unused though.

Other languages (Pascal, Ocaml, maybe Zig) have proven that it's possible to implement a very fast compiler that emits efficient machine code while not dumbing down the language to complete brain death.

Add Common Lisp to the list. And even Scala has fast compile times today.

> Circularity between modules is very common and natural

In theory, but in practice it isn't because there are very few language that do not see software design as being hierarchical. That stems primarily from most languages being based on a hierarchical filesystem, which imposes a hierarchical view of the world at the very core. Circular references in languages that are hierarchical end up being very awkward.

There are a small handful of languages that reject all things hierarchical, including the filesystem, but they are few and far between and most probably have never heard of them and they certainly aren't what you are going to find in production. For better or worse, we've settled on a hierarchical model.

> in practice it isn't because there are very few language that do not see software design as being hierarchical

It has been possible since the days of C (via forward declarations / header files) for two compilation units to call functionality in each other circularly. Java and many other languages have followed suit. I don't buy the argument that it is some sort of new or esoteric thing for a compiler to allow this.

Is there a reason you decided to reply after only reading the first sentence? This off-topic straw man you have imaged doesn't exist.

You're going to have to elaborate in words what your actual problem with my comment is. It's not clear to me why you believe I only read the first sentence, nor in what way I am addressing a strawman. It is perhaps you who have misunderstood my point, rather than the other way around. But, again, you've provided not enough details for me to ascertain this.

Your point is understood, and nobody would disagree with it, but your point is towards a straw man. Nobody ever in the history of computing has made this "argument" you have imagined. If you honestly believe that you didn't make it up arbitrarily, where did you get it from?

The argument I mentioned:

> I don't buy the argument that it is some sort of new or esoteric thing for a compiler to allow this

Where I got it from:

> there are very few language that do not see software design as being hierarchical

> Circular references in languages that are hierarchical end up being very awkward.

> There are a small handful of languages that reject all things hierarchical, including the filesystem, but they are few and far between and most probably have never heard of them and they certainly aren't what you are going to find in production

My point being that it is not "awkward" at all for a language to allow circular references between modules. It is only awkward in languages that make it awkward (like Go does). In C (a language over 50 years old) and Java (one of the most widely used languages in the world) it's the most straightforward and natural thing in the world. So it's certainly not correct to say that it is "awkward" in all languages except ones nobody has ever heard of (aka "esoteric", the term I used in my comment).

So yeah I'm still not fully following how I failed to address your comment, or attacked a strawman. Based on what you're saying now, it's clear that you feel I have misunderstood the point you were trying to make. But I can say that it certainly was not based on a single sentence, or a lack of reading on my part. Probably just a confusion of terminology.

So, what did you actually mean?

> Where I got it from:

Which must mean that you only read the first sentence and dreamt up the rest, or didn't read it at all, else you'd know there was nothing said about circular imports being esoteric. In fact, the comment you originally replied to wouldn't work if they were esoteric.

> It is only awkward in languages that make it awkward (like Go does).

How could it be awkward in Go? It doesn't support circular references. It cannot be awkward – it isn't possible at all! This was already told in earlier comments, so how did you manage to get here not knowing that other than by not reading the comments?

> there was nothing said about circular imports being esoteric

If you aren't saying that circular imports are not common and natural, then don't reply to the statement "circularity between modules is very common and natural" with the statement "In theory, but in practice it isn't"

I have no quarrel with you. If there has been a misunderstanding, then simply correct it and elaborate. That could have been a 2-second interaction - I would have replied "oh, my mistake, I misunderstood what you were saying" and this conversation would be over.

On the other hand, if your goal is just to look smart or superior, or make me look dumb because you believe I'm incapable of reading, then feel free. I have better things to do with my time.

I won't be replying further.

> How could it be awkward in Go? It doesn't support circular references. It cannot be awkward – it isn't possible at all!

There are workarounds. That was the whole point of the beginning of this entire comment chain - me pointing out that these workarounds are worse quality code than if the compiler just supported doing things in a more straightforward way.

> If you aren't saying that circular imports are not common and natural...

Like said, in theory they are natural. In practice they usually aren't, because the languages people use are usually designed around the idea of being hierarchical. That is true of C, and especially true of Java which doubles down on the concept. As before – the part you seemed to not read – circular imports in those languages is possible, but awkward due to their hierarchical view of the world.

> There are workarounds.

You're right that you can achieve a similar effect by hacking up the use of go:linkname, but you're completely bypassing the import system to do that. I don't think that is reasonably considered circular imports. Besides, that approach is not really awkward. That approach is foolish, if not plain stupid.

[The following is intended as language-agnostic.]

It’s useful to distinguish between interface and implementation dependencies. I agree that there shouldn’t be circular interface dependencies between modules. The absence of circular interface dependencies allows separate compilation of modules. It also means that at least in principle, the implementations can be made non-circular (can be refactored to non-circular without breaking any of the existing interfaces). But it’s often okay for the implementation of A to depend on the interface of B, and at the same time the implementation of B to depend on the interface of A, as long as there is no mutual dependency between the interfaces of A and B.

> In my opinion, not allowing circular dependencies is a great design choice for building large programs.

I have a hobby project with maybe 20 packages involved. Circular dependencies were getting harder and harder to solve.

What worked in this situation was to separate the whole hairball into two layers. The packages in the app layer could import packages from the utilities layer, but not vice-versa.

This introduced enough structure to simplify the removal of circularities and prevent new outbreaks.

But, don't you know you can't have a utils package either?

A package must implement one functionality, and it must be clear from the short import name what that functionality is.

A package is also the only way to enforce visibility (and often, with that, other useful properties like immutability).

So packages can't be too big, or too generic, but they can't also be too small, or too specific.

I also have 2 (or 3?) layers, and a utils package, and the packages are huge, and yet I need various cheats to allow cyclic dependencies, and have some repetition with other tricks to avoid some of it.

It's the real world, and guess what, the very well designed standard library does… all of the above too.

What do you mean by "can't"?

"Can not" means "not possible", but it's clearly possible.

I obviously meant "can't" not RFC 2119 "MUST NOT".

I could list more sources, but I'll just leave you with these:

https://go.dev/blog/package-names

https://google.github.io/styleguide/go/best-practices#util-p...

https://dave.cheney.net/2019/01/08/avoid-package-names-like-...

The Google style guide is worth a read through, as the subsequent point recognizes the difficulties around package size. It can make sense to have a package with a single function, and it can almost make sense to stuff your entire program/library in a single package.

The two rules work that exacerbate this tension are precisely visibility and no cyclic dependencies.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. Forbidding cyclic dependencies is one such case, IMO.

> But, don't you know you can't have a utils package either?

Oh, I know. What I have is over half a dozen such packages named "*utils".

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