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rogpeppe1on Show HN: A new stdlib for Golang focusing on platform native support

One of Go's big selling points is the avoidance of the "red-blue problem" (https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-...). The standard Go implementation does that by using lightweight "goroutines" that automatically suspend themselves whenever they do some operation that might block - there's no need to use an OS-level thread for each thread of control.

I wonder how the authors plan to accomplish a similar thing while remaining fully FFI-compatible.

rogpeppe1on Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

> Sure, but more data will be attached to it. Also, in his proposal, he said that IP addresses will not be logged. I seriously doubt that.

I think it's worth quoting what Russ said in the article, which sounds very reasonable to me:

> The server would necessarily observe the source IP address in the TCP session uploading the report, but the server would not record that address with the data, a fact that can be confirmed by inspecting the reporting server source code (the server would be open source like the rest of Go) or by reference to a stated privacy policy like the one for the Go module mirror, depending on whether you lean more toward trusting software engineers or lawyers. A company could also run their own HTTP proxy to shield individual system’s IP addresses and arrange for employee systems to set GOTELEMETRY to the address of that proxy. It may also make sense to allow Go module proxies to proxy uploads, so that the existing GOPROXY setting also works for redirecting the upload and shielding the system’s IP address.

> This means that, except for the fact that I don't work in Go, most of my private conversation with a machine could be backdoored.

I don't get this. Given the design that the article is describing, how could most of your private conversation with a machine be backdoored? Specifically given that the Go tool is open source and used by millions already. Are you worried about sneaky code hidden inside that source code? If so, you should be worried already, because there's no reason that they couldn't already be doing that if they were so inclined.

rogpeppe1on Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

> First, making network requests when downloading packages is necessary for the tool to function and unavoidable.

It's technically not unavoidable. The Go authors could have made use of the proxy opt-in rather than opt-out, making the tool less usable as a result. A similar argument applies here, I think.

> Second, the Go telemetry would apparently create a unique, persistent user ID

Where did you see this? I scanned through the "Telemetry Design" article reasonably carefully and couldn't find any mention of this concept, and the type definition for the posted JSON (the `Report` type) doesn't seem to include any such user ID.

In the end, ISTM that you're not complaining about something that actually affects your privacy in any way, but just the _idea_ of telemetry. Is that really something worth taking such a hardline stance on?

rogpeppe1on Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

So you see this as just the same, from a privacy perspective, as the way that the Go tool already dials out to the Go proxy by default? That is, if you're OK with that (I'd assume not, but it is at least existing functionality), you'd see the telemetry proposal as similar?

In other words, I think you object to the Go tool already, so this is really no different?

rogpeppe1on Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

Have you read the articles? How is this in any way violating privacy?

rogpeppe1on Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

> @rsc, if you ever see this, your proposal here means that I will never use any software written in Go ever again, if at all possible.

Have you actually read the articles?

The "data put up for sale" is to be made available publicly.

IP logging can already be done (the Go proxy is enabled by default).

All the source code is open.

What's your actual problem with this, beyond a knee-jerk reaction to the idea?

rogpeppe1on Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

That ship has already sailed. The Go tool already by default makes network requests to the Go proxy, which potentially allows everything that you're talking about there. What's significantly different about this telemetry proposal?

rogpeppe1on The Next Step for Generics

I'm not sure that hiding the implementation is worth it here. Why not just make it public that it's actually map[T]struct{} underneath - then anyone can range on it and implement allocation optimisations, etc? I added some other methods too for the crack https://go2goplay.golang.org/p/EI1hYaSohnc

rogpeppe1on The Next Step for Generics

There's no need to use the pointer in there; you could just use an ok bool instead (saving the indirection): https://go2goplay.golang.org/p/4hr8zINfRym

I think it's interesting to observe that using the Result type is really not that much different from using a multiple return value - it's actually worse in some ways because you end up using "Unwrap" which can panic.

rogpeppe1on The Incredible Proof Machine (2016)

OK, replying to myself for future reference. I found the answer here: https://youtu.be/0GeJdTTzaDo (incidentally, that series of videos seems to have solutions for most of these problems).

The answer is that the left and right side of the notch holds local equivalents to the global "given X, prove Y" connectors. You can use the left side of the notch as an input, and you can connect that up through the global blocks to prove the hypothesis.

That was non-obvious! Also, the technique of connecting the output first and making connections to nothing to see what the implied proposition is was very useful - I should have thought of that.

rogpeppe1on The Incredible Proof Machine (2016)

This was a fun puzzle, but I came to a roadblock here too.

I have to confess I'm confused by what I believe might be the "local hypothesis block" mentioned above. The confusion is somewhat greater because the blocks don't seem to have any attached name or description, so it's not clear what they're meant to be doing.

Up until task 5 in session 2, all the solutions are pretty trivial. But I can't work out what sort of wiring that block implies (for the record, the task is "given (A->B, B->C), prove (A->C)").

It's really not clear to me what the "notch" at the top of that block implies, or how it might be used.

I think there should be at least one "hand-holding" solution for the first use of each block type. Even the papers linked to don't describe the intended semantics of each block.

Any hints here?

rogpeppe1on Go += Package Versioning

You can specify that a given dependency be replaced by another one. That only applies at the top level though, not when the go.mod file with the replace clause is used by another module.

rogpeppe1on 3.5 Years, 500k Lines of Go

Don't keep type safety then. Think of Go as half-way between Python and Haskell in that respect. Types are great when they're useful, but they're not required.

rogpeppe1on 3.5 Years, 500k Lines of Go

I tend to check out one branch, run godeps -u, then check out the other one and run godeps -N -u. Then you've got the newest deps from both branches. I still wouldn't resolve the conflict manually.

rogpeppe1on 3.5 Years, 500k Lines of Go

> I'd rather have a test that correctly reasonably verifies that a package is correct (or at least "passes the race detector consistently") and reaches into some of the private details than fail to test a package. Too many bugs I've found that way.

I agree with this, with the caveat that if you can test a package with regard to its public API only, it is desirable to do so because it gives much greater peace of mind when doing significant refactoring.

The difficulty comes in larger software where the package you're testing uses other packages as part of its implementation which also have their own time-based logic. Do we export all those synchronisation points so that importers can use them to help their tests too? If we do, then suddenly our API surface is significantly larger and more fragile - what would have been an internal fix can become a breaking change for many importers.

rogpeppe1on 3.5 Years, 500k Lines of Go

> Mocking out the time functions means you don't get any race conditions.

This is a common misapprehension. Actually, even if you fully mock out time, you can still get race conditions, because goroutines can remain active regardless of the state of the clock, and there's no general way to wait until all goroutines are quiescent waiting on the clock. This is not just a theoretical concern - this kind of problem is not uncommon in practice.

I think clock-mocking can be very useful for testing hard-to-reach places in leaf packages. But at a higher level, I think it can end up producing extremely fragile tests that depend intimately on implementation details of packages that the tests should not be concerned about at all. In these cases, I've come to prefer configuring short time intervals and polling for desired state as being the lesser of two evils.

rogpeppe1on 3.5 Years, 500k Lines of Go

The godeps file is just a dependency-per-line, tab-separated values, deliberately so it's easily amenable to shell script processing.

Aside: the conflicts mentioned in the article should never be a real problem because you can always resolve the conflict by just recreating the dependences.tsv file (you should never be editing it manually anyway).

rogpeppe1on My Go Resolutions for 2017

Exceptions don't always give you useful stack traces in a concurrent situation, because the current stack may only reflect a goroutine that's processing data on behalf of another. The real execution context may involve many more.

rogpeppe1on My Go Resolutions for 2017

or gopkg.in/errgo.v1 which is a bit more opinionated about error causes.

rogpeppe1on What Golang Is and Is Not

This particular issue is unfortunate - it can't be changed without potentially breaking existing programs.

See https://github.com/golang/go/issues/11513 and https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-dev/c9UUfASVP... for some background.

rogpeppe1on Four days of Go

From the article:

    In order to do evil things like convert raw bytes to floats,
    I chose to use the “unsafe” package

FWIW you don't need unsafe to do that. encoding/binary + http://golang.org/pkg/math/#Float64frombits will do the job just fine.

rogpeppe1on “Go’s design is a disservice to intelligent programmers”

I'd like to hear more details of your issues here. What's not good about the bufio package? What do you mean by "poor abstractions"? What's wrong with creating a single purpose local type rather than using a function literal?

rogpeppe1on From Node.js to Go

FWIW Go does implement a significant subset of generics in a type-safe way. For any parametric type P[T], if P has no public methods or fields that mention T, then Go can implement it by allowing an interface (not necessarily interface{}) type for T. As long as the implementation of P does not upcast T values (something which is generally frowned upon, although tolerated in some circumstances), this will be as type-safe as in any language with parametric polymorphism.

For example, bufio.NewReader would probably, in a language with generics, be phrased as a type with respect to a type parameter. Something like (in bastard Haskell)

    class Reader a where
        Read :: a -> [Char]


    newReader :: (Reader a) => a -> BufioReader a

In Go, it's:

    package bufio
    func NewReader(r io.Reader) *Reader

The interface argument is implicitly a type parameter here.

This subset of generics covers a wide range of software components, even if it doesn't include the usual container types.

rogpeppe1on Why Tech Startups Should Look at Go

> Go would have a reasonable compile-time type system, except that without > generics you end up having to cast a lot, which renders your compile-time > type system almost irrelevant.

In my experience of Go, this is not actually true. For example, in the latest project I've been working on, there are 8487 lines of non-test code. In that code, there are a total of 16 dynamic casts, more than half of which are checked (mostly checking for particular error types). There are a total of 4 occurrences which might possibly be amenable to generics.

The type system is totally relevant, and checks 99.9% of our code.

rogpeppe1on Why Go Is Not Good

http://golang.org/pkg/go/ast/

Well, not that small, i guess :-)

rogpeppe1on Why Go Is Not Good

Actually Go interfaces map pretty well to a concurrent (and likely networked environment). It's often straightforward to put a network-based implementation behind a Go interface type. When was the last time you saw a web service that is parameterised by a type?

rogpeppe1on What Go Might Be Like With Generics

How about this instead? http://play.golang.org/p/hED7faR0q_

rogpeppe1on Web.go – Web applications with Go

Nice package. I like the fact that it's limited in scope and actually does some work for you. There's a trick you're missing though - you require the user to pass in their expected params struct explicitly so you can reflect on its type, but you could just reflect on the handler function type itself.

Then a handler function could look like this:

    func Do(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request, params *DoParams) {
         w.Write([]byte(params.Var))
    }

No need for any dynamic type coercion - it can all be checked up front when the handlers are registered. The down side is that the signature of Handle would become more opaque (its argument would just be an interface{}) and you'd probably want to lose the Handler type.

FWIW, passing an empty struct for the sole purpose of being inspected using reflection is not unusual (see for example gob.Register).

rogpeppe1on Ask HN: Do you see the future in Go?

You should check out github.com/niemeyer/qml

rogpeppe1on On Go

i usually do something like this instead:

  type Config struct {
    a int
    b string
    c float
    d interface{}
  }

  var defaultConfig = Config{
     a: 11,
     b: "some default",
     c: 55.5,
     d: new(D),
  }

  func f(cfg Config) {
      // ...
  }

  func main() {
     cfg := defaultConfig
     cfg.c = 44.4
     f(cfg)
  }

having the "keyword" arguments as a separate type makes them potentially useful as a currency to pass to other functions too, rather than as a set of attributes and values defined for one function only.