Comment by mitchellh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mitchellh | Hacker News Reader

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Sorry, note my "pedantics:" note on the bottom. If you ignore errors then you're actively going against the idiomatic way to write Go. I never claimed it was compiler-enforced. I'm not arguing for or against either side either (compiler or non-compiler), I'm just trying to state facts.

It is true that panics exist, but panics generally represent non-recoverable errors that deserve to crash. They're very rarely bugs (except slice access, which I mentioned). In practice, in any Go systems I've written, panics have not been an issue and have really never occurred (except, again, slice access, which I mentioned).

Regarding your comment below (I can't comment because it is too deep): where did you quote me saying the compiler forces you to handle errors? It doesn't, and if I said that it is an error.

I don't know how people keep misreading my comments, so in all caps: THE GO COMPILER DOES NOT ENFORCE ERROR HANDLING AND I NEVER CLAIMED IT DID (in any of my comments).

As frou_dh points out below, Go does not force all errors to be handled (edit: to be clear, they don't even have to handle it with _ ). See this working example in the playground for reference: http://play.golang.org/p/IPDTG6Ub2b

Edit: The comment that you replied to said "Go does not force you to handle errors." Your comment said "True but it's not idiomatic." My reply was meant to show that it's very easy to ignore errors in code that is not obviously un-idiomatic. Also, note that in your grandparent comment, you stated, "The PRIMARY reason Go is so reliable is also a reason many people hate go: you _have_ to handle every error." In my link, however, the error goes unhandled.

> Sorry, note my "pedantics:" note on the bottom. If you ignore errors then you're actively going against the idiomatic way to write Go.

Just wait when Go spreads into the enterprise. You will see _ everywhere.

It's idiomatic in every language to handle errors, Go is not unique there.

I disagree. It's not idiomatic in, say, Python, to catch every possible exception, only the specific ones that the programmer thinks are likely to occur in practice.

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