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Less is exponentially more

Here is the text of the talk I gave at the Go SF meeting in June, 2012.

This is a personal talk. I do not speak for anyone else on the Go team here, although I want to acknowledge right up front that the team is what made and continues to make Go happen. I'd also like to thank the Go SF organizers for giving me the opportunity to talk to you.

I was asked a few weeks ago, "What was the biggest surprise you encountered rolling out Go?" I knew the answer instantly: Although we expected C++ programmers to see Go as an alternative, instead most Go programmers come from languages like Python and Ruby. Very few come from C++.

We—Ken, Robert and myself—were C++ programmers when we designed a new language to solve the problems that we thought needed to be solved for the kind of software we wrote. It seems almost paradoxical that other C++ programmers don't seem to care.

I'd like to talk today about what prompted us to create Go, and why the result should not have surpris…
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Error handling in Upspin

The Upspin project uses a custom package, upspin.io/errors, to represent error conditions that arise inside the system. These errors satisfy the standard Go error interface, but are implemented using a custom type, upspin.io/errors.Error, that has properties that have proven valuable to the project.

Here we will demonstrate how the package works and how it is used. The story holds lessons for the larger discussion of error handling in Go.

Motivations

A few months into the project, it became clear we needed a consistent approach to error construction, presentation, and handling throughout the code. We decided to implement a custom errors package, and rolled one out in an afternoon. The details have changed a bit but the basic ideas behind the package have endured. These were:

To make it easy to build informative error messages.To make errors easy to understand for users.To make errors helpful as diagnostics for programmers.
As we developed experience with the package, some other motivations…
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Self-referential functions and the design of options

I've been trying on and off to find a nice way to deal with setting options in a Go package I am writing. Options on a type, that is. The package is intricate and there will probably end up being dozens of options. There are many ways to do this kind of thing, but I wanted one that felt nice to use, didn't require too much API (or at least not too much for the user to absorb), and could grow as needed without bloat.

I've tried most of the obvious ways: option structs, lots of methods, variant constructors, and more, and found them all unsatisfactory. After a bunch of trial versions over the past year or so, and a lot of conversations with other Gophers making suggestions, I've finally found one I like. You might like it too. Or you might not, but either way it does show an interesting use of self-referential functions.

I hope I have your attention now.

Let's start with a simple version. We'll refine it to get to the final version.

First, we define an option typ…
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