alt Hacker NewsGo designers distinguish between Go language as defined by Go spec and implementation details.
//go:fix is something understood by a particular implementation of Go. Another implementation could implement Go without implementing support for //go:fix and it would be a fully compliant implementation of Go, the language.
If they made it part of the syntax, that would require other implementations to implement it.
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bheadmaster • yesterday at 10:01 PM
That's such an elegant solution.
I keep being impressed at subtle but meaningful things that Go does right.
If the comments impact correctness (which inlining doesn't, but I believe there are other directives that do), saying it's "an implementation detail" waves away "it's an implementation detail that everyone needs" aka part of the spec.
The reason it feels like a kludge is that "comments" are normally understood to be non-impactful. Is a source transformation that removes all comments valid? If comments have no impact per the spec, yes. But that's not the case here.
In practice comments in go are defined to be able to carry semantic meaning extensibly. Whether they're safe to ignore depends on what meaning is given to the directives, e.g. conditional compilation directives.