Comment by jerf

Mmm, that's fair. I tend to forget about it because it's not something I personally struggle with but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.

I'd still rate it well below a string eval or a default shell interface that takes strings and treats them like shell does. You assert down below that you've seen this lead to a critical vulnerability and I believe you, but in general what happens if you forget to check errors is that sooner or later you get a panic or something else that goes so far off the rails that your program crashes, not that you get privs you shouldn't. As I say in another comment, any sort of confusing bit of code in any language could be the linchpin of some specific security vulnerability, but there are still capabilities that lead to more security issues than some other capabilities. Compared to what I've seen in languages like Perl this is still only "medium-grade" at best.

And I'm not trying to "defend" Go, which is part of why I gave the laundry list of issues it still has. It's just a matter of perspective; even missing the odd error check here or there is just not the same caliber problem as an environment where people casually blast user-sourced input out to shell because the language makes it easier than doing it right.

(Independent of language I consider code that looks like

    operation = determineOperation()
    if !canIDoOperation(operation) {
        // handle failures
    }
    doOperation(operation)

architecturally broken anyhow. It seems natural code to write, but this is a form of default allow. If you forget to check the operation in one place, or even perhaps forget to write a return in the if clause, the operation proceeds anyhow. You need to write some structure where operations can't be reached without a positive affirmation that it is allowed. I'd bet the code that was broken due to failing to check an error amounted to this in the end. (Edit: Oh, I see you did say that.) And, like I said, this is independent of Go; other than the capabilities-based languages this code can be written in pretty much anything.)