alt Hacker NewsFor unmarshalling, but the original complaint was about marshalling. And for that the type system could help if the marshal API only allowed you to marshal objects of types that supported marshalling.
And even for unmarshalling you could get a compile time error if you try to unmarshall to a type that doesn't support it.
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awesome_dude • yesterday at 11:48 PM
I'm confused by this - you're saying that a "type system" would address this, even though there are two (incompatible) type systems at play here - Go's and JSON's
Compile time cannot check for runtime values (not even in Rust) - is your position that fields can only be populated at compile time?
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I’d already addressed that when I said the marshal API is an interface that’s meant to be reusable across generalise use cases. it can be used for a variety of data formats and not just JSON.
Go has this concept baked into the language. For example read and write interfaces so you can write data to an endpoint without having to worry about whether it’s a file system object, TCP/UDP socket, gzip achieve, and a plethora of other options too.
It’s a nice convenience feature and makes up considerably for the restrictions that the Go type system places.
And if you need higher performance code, or compile time safety, or have any other constraints that limit your ability to use these generalised interfaces, then you can use different APIs from the Go standard library to achieve the same thing.
You don’t need to call json.Marshal() if you don’t want to. It’s an option, but it’s just one API into the JSON toolbox.