Comment by randomdata

Comment by randomdata 9 days ago

That's because nobody has yet solved the side effect problem of the sugar.

All the proposals that have ever been given have ultimately boiled down to essentially `return err`, which, while suitable for meme comments on an internet forum, cannot be used in a real production application for many obvious (and some not immediately obvious) reasons.

At least under the direction of rsc (the new leadership is still settling into the role so that is less clear), the will to add such sugar was there if a good solution was found. But the solution has yet to be found.

jimbokun 9 days ago

I don't know what the syntax should look like.

But the most common pattern is a sequence of calls to functions that return an optional error plus the happy path value, followed by a short circuiting check of the error, followed by a call to another function with the happy path value as an argument. It's very common to have a chain of these kinds of calls making up the body of a function.

It seems like "return err" is very useful for this pattern, if I understand you correctly. A function returning the error from the first call it makes that fails, or the happy path value if all the calls succeed. Seems like it should be possible to bake that pattern into the language, but its tricky doing it a way that doesn't obfuscate the underlying semantics, which is very important to many Go developers.

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randomdata 9 days ago

> I don't know what the syntax should look like.
I'm not sure the syntax is all that significant. There have been numerous proposals, but the syntax was never the reason for rejection. It is that the entire concept is unusable in the state that it is understood.
That's not to say the problems can't be solved, but nobody has yet.
> It's very common to have a chain of these kinds of calls making up the body of a function.
Yes, like in Rust, for example. But it also has defined traits and other features on top of the chaining to deal with the same problems Go would suffer from it had such syntax. Theoretically Go could introduce the same, but it remains unclear how to do that in a way that makes sense in the Go language.
Again, there is probably a solution out there, but nobody has come up with it yet. Surprisingly, these kind of things aren't sent down from the heavens by a magical deity. It takes human effort, which isn't there because they are busy ranting on HN.
> It seems like "return err" is very useful for this pattern
Where would you find it useful (memes aside)?

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