Hacker News Reader

Comment by obeattie | Hacker News Reader

    JSON.parse(`go run json.go`)

No.

View on HN

While I can sympathize with your critique, I wish it were a bit more elaborate so that the author has an idea about what should have been done better. What is bad about that? What are the alternative solutions, etc.

I think s/he objects to the idea of asking Go to compile and then run the program each time, rather than running the resulting binary:

    JSON.parse(`./json`)

   `exec #{Rails.root}/tmp/go_#{m} #{arguments}`

The escaping leaves a bit to be desired.

More than just the escaping. You should also clean your environment, providing the child process with a bare minimum of information it needs to do its job.

Otherwise you leave yourself open to future security issues, especially if you keep API keys or DB passwords in ENV.

Also, it's generally a good idea to write code where the original developer's intent can be easily figured out by looking at the code. If the code is too compact, does too much magic (or it's too verbose, which is the other extreme) it can be difficult to tell what was intentional, how it was meant to work, if something is a bug or not. The code should "tell a story", so to speak.

Further down you can see he only does that in a development environment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com