Go get this completely wrong! It use a tuple rather than an enum for potential errors. This means you can forget to check errors and just use the invalid (nil?) return value from the function.
On the other hand, rust uses the Either enum to force you to handle the error. Alternatively you can use the ? operator to pass it to the calling function, which is reflected in the enclosing function's type.
It's a product of functional programming, and for me I can't see how you would ever want to handle errors outside of the functional programming railway-oriented style. For me it's just superior.
It's absolutely possible to compute wrong pointer offsets. It's absolutely possible to dereference nil. It's absolutely possible to bork ownership and have multiple thread trample a struct. It's absolutely possible to reinterpret memory the wrong way.
I do agree that UAF is not possible (in most cases) due to the GC. That array indexing out of bounds is not possible. But it is by no means "memory safe" to the level Rust is.
This is specifically the one place where go is not memory safe IMO.
> It's absolutely possible to compute wrong pointer offsets.
In Go? Without the `unsafe` package (at which point you are explicitly opting out)? How? There's no pointer offset in the first place.
> It's absolutely possible to dereference nil.
Yeah, but that's safe defined behavior in go equivalent to "unwrap"ing a None option in rust. It reliably crashes. It's not like C where it's undefined behavior and you might crash of you might just corrupt random memory or have the optimizer make your code do something even stranger.
It's (really the lack of non-nil types) is one of many reasons why go doesn't produce as reliable software as rust, but it's not a memory safety issue.
> It's absolutely possible to reinterpret memory the wrong way.
Again, without the unsafe package? How?
>> It's absolutely possible to reinterpret memory the wrong way. > Again, without the unsafe package? How?
Again my go is rusty, but I saw quite a bit of shenanigans in go with pointer casting from what's essentially a collection of void*. However perhaps those casts blow up at runtime? I'm too used to rust where it's explicit where it'll blow up.
>> It's absolutely possible to dereference nil. > Yeah, but that's safe defined behavior in go equivalent to "unwrap"ing a None option in rust. It reliably crashes. It's not like C where it's undefined behavior and you might crash of you might just corrupt random memory or have the optimizer make your code do something even stranger.
Agreed. I conflated "safety" and "robustness" here. The existence of nil is a thorn in the language.
Thanks for the corrections!
Until you stumble upon the countless footguns. At least they generally don’t lead to memory unsafety, just garbage data.
Data Race Patterns in Go
The other big thing that makes it spiritually like Go is that you follow the same pattern of: allocate resource, immediately defer deallocation.
I mean, at that point pretty much every language would be a decent choice.
>great error handling
why people so confident being so wrong???
