Google hosting Go on GitHub. Microsoft hosting .NET on GitHub. It must feel like an accomplishment to be implicitly endorsed by these companies.

Considering open source's history, you'd think its primary management tool would be open source as well. I guess it's GitHub's combination of accessible design + performant version control + lack of ads + reliability that made it the premium source for anything open source.

I'm impressed.

srcmap

Use go for a few month, loving it. but I miss not having exception compare to Python.

Is the golang spec still tightly controlled by 3 wisemen in Google and no feature is allowed to add to the language without all three in total agreement?

BTW, I like 98% of their language decide choices and absolutely LOVE the compilation speed of the program.

NateDad

No, it's not controlled by them anymore. Possibly in the early days it was, but now it's much more community controlled.

You'll never get exceptions in Go. No one who has used go for a significant period of time wants exceptions. Error values are far superior (given the other features of the language, like multiple returns and interfaces for the error types).

You should continue to use Go, I don't think you'll miss exceptions after long. I understand the view, though... first time I saw Go I thought "No exceptions? Pass!". But I got over it, and now I've seen the error of my ways :) There's an amazing freedom that comes with knowing that random functions you call can't exit your function without your control.

acdha

> You'll never get exceptions in Go. No one who has used go for a significant period of time wants exceptions

If by exception you mean Java's implementation, yes. If by exception you mean not allowing programmers to ignore error values, as most Go programs seems to do at least once, no.

I think most of this could be solved easily by either a compiler option or golint rule flagging any time someone does the classic `res, _ := foo()` punt without checking the value before the end of the block or the next time that variable is assigned to. That'd satisfy the “stop repeating C's mistakes” goal most people have without requiring the other changes which true exceptions would require.

NateDad

> think most of this could be solved easily by either a compiler option or golint rule

You mean like errcheck? https://github.com/kisielk/errcheck

I'm not sure if it can find spots where people intentionally throw away an error like in

    val, _ := foo()

Usually people are more concerned with places where people accidentally fail to realize there's an error returned at all, like this:

    func foo() error { ... }

    foo() // errcheck finds this

However, it should be possible to find errors assigned to underscores, and thus detect that case.