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willahmad • yesterday at 6:01 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

without language level support, it makes code look like a mess.

Imagine, 3 level nesting calls where each calls another 3 methods, we are talking about 28 functions each with couple of variables, of course you can still clean them up, but imagine how clean code will look if you don't have to.

Just like garbage collection, you can free up memory yourself, but someone forgot something and we have either memory leak or security issues.

Replies

HendrikHensen • yesterday at 6:35 PM

With good helpers, it could become something as simple as

    key := make([]byte, 32)
    defer scramble(&key)
    // do all the secret stuff
Unless I don't understand the problem correctly.
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compsciphd • yesterday at 6:10 PM

I could imagine code that did something like this for primatives

  secretStash := NewSecretStash()
  pString := secretStash.NewString()
  ....
  ....
  secretStash.Thrash()
yes, you now have to deal in pointers, but that's not too ugly, and everything is stored in secretStash so can iterate over all the types it supports and thrash them to make them unusable, even without the gc running.
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