Question from someone trying to get better at Go: _before_ going all in with unsafe pointer operations, would it make sense to write a function harness & profile it with/without the -B flag to determine the actual impact of bounds check?
And as the essay mentions there are also “hints” you can give the compiler to fold bounds checks which may be sufficient.
Like, I have a hardcoded 1024-byte buffer, my loop is hardcoded so its index increases modulo 1024, it can never run off the end any more than you can overtake your own bike chain?
better at Go to ship apps — none of that needed. actually opposite. the less complexity and low level details you hardcode yourself, the better. chances are, this low-level tech debt will bite you back when you have no time to deal with it. keep it simple.
better at Go to work with internals of Go/compilers/runtime — yes, but do you plan to ship one? or why it is needed at all? or do you work at Go core at Google?
> probably you do not need to do any of that.
Indeed, I find that at least in my case, on a pretty average Intel machine these checks add very little overhead, especially compared to the benefits. I do not really understand how the examples in the blog post can get 100% (1st one) or even 10% (2nd one) faster.
(And yeah, I know that the obvious solution is to develop these tools in C/C++: I am just exploring the capabilities of Go in that space).