Hacker News Reader

Package users should not have to run "go generate". It's mainly for package writers to generate code and then distribute it.

View on HN

And? Presumably some of these packages get updated, handed off, or are collaborative in the first place. Re-generating is part of continuing development.

Sure, but that's not specific to any language. Is it Go's fault that package writers work a certain way?

Go encourages working in that way, so yes, it is.

With other languages, you might do code generation through powerful macros (e.g. as rust has) or some other tooling which is not literally just "run a program in the user's path".

My point is that `go generate` requires more than just source, and thus isn't "simpler" in the manner claimed in the article.

I'm not judging the existence of `go generate` or it's merits relative to some other environments. Except makefiles. Makefiles are worse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com