I certainly agree with the Go designers about a lot of what is bad and should be left out of the language. The problem is that what they have left is not a good language. I don't want a larger language, but definitely a far more expressive and substantially better designed one.
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Go interfaces are almost type classes. Drop reflection / dynamic casting / runtime typing. Add type parameters, and allow using interfaces as bounds on them for static dispatch via interfaces. Drop tons of hard-wired special cases due to that. Basically, apply some good taste...
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I like the general concept behind Go, just not what they actually created. If they had been deeply familiar with ML family languages, I think there's a very high chance they would have created a language that I'd think is great. It's so close in a sense, yet so far in practice.
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I followed development of Go from the announcement, and I'm very familiar. I made the mistake of choosing it for some projects and have written a fair bit in it. The language design cripples library design so much too, so despite a lot of great library design, they're not good.
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Drop multiple return values and have proper tuples. Replace UTF-8 by convention with real UTF-8. Make pointers non-nullable and replace null with sum types (compiler can still use null). Remove switches, and provide pattern matching instead. Remove lots of more hard-wired stuff.
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it sounds like you basically want to use Reason with Core (since Core makes a point of avoiding exceptions, and I don't think they use classes anywhere)
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(typeclasses, well, there's modular implicits, but I don't know when or if they'll be upstream. it's taking a while, but multicore is also taking a while in spite of being actively worked on, and that's just how OCaml is, I guess...)
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I am curious how these languages "without exceptions" (of any sort) manage failures of the language's abstract machine (eg, allocation failure and other run-time errors). Go has an exception (panic) and a slightly devious way to recover it.
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Go doesn't truly handle allocation failures. Also, in a high-level language, I want thread-local heaps and automatic resource management not only automatic memory management. I don't believe in invisible control flow with hidden and rarely if ever tested code paths everywhere.
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For a low-level language with meaningful out-of-memory handling, I think Rust's approach to error handling is fine. The issues I have with Rust are really with the standard library. Disabling it via the attribute and using only the core standard library avoids unwinding, etc.
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I think that's the main issue with it: for many truly compelling use cases, where you actually want a low-level language, a lot of the standard library isn't suitable. It's nice there's a core standard library for use in a kernel, C ABI library, etc. but there should be way more.
So, for example, with Vec<T>, a method like vec.push(value) just has to return Option<T> with #[must_use] where Some(T) means that memory allocation failed, and it hands you back ownership of the element you passed into it. It works well and composes well. It's not that bad.
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Unwinding on allocation failure is a decision not to handle it. The same thing applies to most errors. It isn't actually considered during development and those code paths aren't visible in the code or tested in practice. You need the ability to inject allocation failures too.
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