alt Hacker News//go:fix inline and the source-level inliner
Comments
If I follow, this isn't a compile time inline directive, it's a `go fix` time source transformation of client code calling the annotated function.
Per the post, it sounds like this is most effective in closed-ecosystem internal monorepo-like contexts where an organisation has control over every instance of client code & can `go fix` all of the call sites to completely eradicate all usage of a deprecated APIs:
> For many years now, our Google colleagues on the teams supporting Java, Kotlin, and C++ have been using source-level inliner tools like this. To date, these tools have eliminated millions of calls to deprecated functions in Google’s code base. Users simply add the directives, and wait. During the night, robots quietly prepare, test, and submit batches of code changes across a monorepo of billions of lines of code. If all goes well, by the morning the old code is no longer in use and can be safely deleted. Go’s inliner is a relative newcomer, but it has already been used to prepare more than 18,000 changelists to Google’s monorepo.
It could still have some incremental benefit for public APIs where client code is not under centralised control, but would not allow deprecated APIs to be removed without breakage.
It looks the following code will be rewritten badly, but no ways to avoid it? If this is true, maybe the blog article should mention this.
package main
//go:fix inline
func handle() {
recover()
}
func foo() {
handle()
}
func main() {
defer foo()
panic("bye")
}I wonder why they chose to add these directives as comments as opposed to adding new syntax for them. It feels like a kludge.
Good illustration that a seemingly simple feature could require a ton of functionality under the hood. Would be nice to have this in Python.