alt Hacker NewsPersonally, I've come to really hate channels in Go. They are a source of some seriously heinous deadlock bugs that are really hard to debug, and closing channels in the wrong spot can crash your entire app. I try using plain locks until it hurts before I reach for channels these days.
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Agreed. I especially think it was common to overuse channels when golang was younger as that was “the go way”. I think people have started to realize that channels are complex and a sharp abstraction and they should not be used frivolously.
I can’t think of the last time I actually wrote code which directly created channels. Of course things like contexts, tickers, etc are implemented with channels and I think that is ideally how they should be used — in well defined and self contained library code.
Totally different perspective here. Never dissapointed with channels, can't stand async.
Well over half of the code I've ever seen that uses three or more channels (i.e. two semantic ones plus a cancellation or shutdown) has had serious flaws in it.
Granted, that generally means they're doing something non-trivial with concurrency, and that correlates strongly with "has concurrency bugs". But I see issues FAR more frequently when they reach for channels rather than mutexes. It's bad enough that I just check absolutely every three-chan chunk of code proactively now.
I lay part of the blame on Go's "♥ safe and easy concurrency with channels! ♥" messaging. And another large chunk at the lack of generics (until recently), making abstracting these kinds of things extremely painful. Combined, you get "just do it by hand lol, it's easy / get good" programming, which is always a source of "fun".