Idiomatic Go generally handles error cases with the pattern: But there is a more extreme error response and that’s panic. The use of the panic() function generally indicates an unexpected error that can not be recovered from. Calling panic exits your program with a non-zero value and an error…

As I’ve worked more and wore with Go generics pursuing cleaner code I’ve tested known patterns from other sources to see how they would work out. Here are two that I didn’t hold much hope out for but turned out to be real winners. TLDR; I found that Sequence/Iterator and the…

Go has always had some challenges regarding polymorphism. Its type system and naming rules just made some things difficult. For example, say your code did a lot of sorting and you frequently needed a LessThan functionality. Now every structure, even in a single package, could implement a method named LessThan…

I’m a bit jaded with regards to programming languages, so I enjoy finding interesting nuances in them. Here a couple from Go. Assignments, Arguments & More If you’ve written any Go you’ll know you can assign multiple return results in one statement: And maybe you know that commas can appear on the right…

I’ve always felt that the WET nature of Go led to a lot of subpar code. One area this really stands out is polymorphism. Go supports interfaces for polymorphism, but because of the limits of the type system interfaces couldn’t achieve their full potential, so we wrote functionally similar code…

I've been eagerly awaiting generics in Go, so I’ve been working with 1.18 since it was only available in the playground and betas. It’s been a positive experience all around. That said, I’ve not pushed my workplace to upgrade until just recently. Why? TLDR Upgrade the release now, and incorporate the…

With Go, you immediately learn that function signatures don’t include type information. So, unlike many languages, you can’t have: func Max(a, b int) func Max(a, b float) You need to include the type information explicitly in the function names to differentiate them: func MaxInt(a, b int) func MaxFloat(a, b float) …

API results pagination is a bit of a trigger issue for me. It’s such an easy concept to conceptualize but is literally an exercise in edge cases. Part of the problem is the name itself, pagination, which evokes the image of advancing, sheet by sheet, through a printed document. What…

There have been lots of discussions on the performance implications of generics in Go, around both specific scenarios and abstractly, let’s try to think a bit more holistically. What is Performance? To frame this let's quickly clarify what we mean by performance. Raw: Grind the code against a benchmark, is it faster or…