▲ 8 ▼ Ask: The new gopher experience

GN posted by kenny 2628 days ago

I'm interested in the experiences of recent converts to Go. Specifically, what bugs and problems you ran into when you were learning the language, coming from another programming language.

1. What were the biggest problems you encountered?

2. What mistakes have you made (e.g. not realising that ListenAndServe is blocking)?

3. What is your biggest cause of panics?

▲ anheric 2627 days ago ▼

1. Project structure and package based design was the hardest to wrap my head around
2. My stubborn-est mistake is not closing that net.conn. As a side note, I had vast problems(mistakes) jumping to concurrency right from the start. Had huge memory leaks and data races, simply because I was guess-coding. The godoc and gospec are so straightforward that I didn't have any excuse, other that not going through it.
3 Well nil pointer dereference of course. All those facepalms

Contributing
▲ kenny 2625 days ago ▼

nil pointer dereference
This one is sort of tricky because it can have so many causes, but perhaps nil was a mistake. It does seem to crop up a lot, as it's easy to leave a pointer uninitialised and not realise till runtime. You can call methods on nil types, which can be a bit confusing too.

Contributing
▲ lolly 2627 days ago ▼

Yes I found it really annoying that they force you to use a particular structure at first. I don't mind so much now but still prefer project based folders with dependencies to the massive monorepo style of go. Maybe using vendor and dep we can get there eventually.

Contributing
▲ tomf 2628 days ago ▼

The biggest problem I had was getting my head around pointers vs method receivers and which to use (I ended up using pointers for almost everything). Also was tripped up by map key iteration order changing. Otherwise it's been pretty plain sailing learning go compared to some other languages.

Contributing
▲ kenny 2628 days ago ▼

I'll start, even though it's been quite a while since I learned go:

1. Groking gopath took a while, at first I didn't understand why I had to change the project structure for lots of projects, when I wasn't even completely committed to go.
2. I made silly mistakes like forgetting ListenAndServe was blocking and wondering why code after it didn't execute, and the classic of wrapping a goroutine in a for loop or range and getting the same index 10 times.
3. For the causes of bugs, I think not allocating maps (the zero value is not useful), nil pointer dereference (for various reasons, mostly programmer error), and out of range errors on slices were the biggest causes of crashes in the first programs I wrote.

Contributing
▲ lolly 2628 days ago ▼

1. GOPATH, and static typing
2. Strings vs Runes - I keep using '' for strings, and it throws cryptic errors
3. I think nil pointer dereference - the billion dollar mistake - still haven't worked out if nil is just a symptom or the cause of that type of problem.

Contributing