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danenania • last Tuesday at 5:30 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

I have no problem with Go’s error handling. It’s not elegant, but it works, and that’s very much in keeping with the pragmatic spirit of Go.

I’m actually kind of surprised that it’s the top complaint among Go devs. I always thought it was more something that people who don’t use Go much complain about.

My personal pet issue is lack of strict null checks—and I’m similarly surprised this doesn’t get more discussion. It’s a way bigger problem in practice than error handling. It makes programs crash in production all the time, whereas error handling is basically just a question of syntax sugar. Please just give me a way to mark a field in a struct required so the compiler can eliminate nil dereference panics as a class of error. It’s opt-in like generics, so I don’t see why it would be controversial to anyone?

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CactusRocket • last Tuesday at 5:45 PM

I have 2 problems.

It's too easy to accidentally write `if err == nil` instead of `if err != nil`. I have even seen LLMs erroneously generate the first instead of the latter. And since it's such a tiny difference and the code is riddled with `if err != nil`, it's hard to catch at review time.

Second, you're not forced by the language to do anything with the error at all. There are cases where `err` is used in a function that not handling the `err` return value from a specific function silently compiles. E.g.

    x, err := strconv.Atoi(s1)
     if err != nil {
      panic(err)
     }
     y, err := strconv.Atoi(s2)

    fmt.Println(x, y)
I think accidentally allowing such bugs, and making them hard to spot, is a serious design flaw in the language.
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masklinn • last Tuesday at 5:46 PM

> It’s opt-in like generics, so I don’t see why it would be controversial to anyone?

It "breaks" the language in fundamental ways — much more fundamental than syntactic sugar for error handling — by making zero values and thus zero initialisation invalid.

You even get this as a fun interaction with generics:

    func Zero[T any]() T {
        var v T
        return v
    }
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