> You validate that strings are UTF-8 at the place where you care that they are UTF-8.
The problem with this, as with any lack of static typing, is that you now have to validate at _every_ place that cares, or to carefully track whether a value has already been validated, instead of validating once and letting the compiler check that it happened.
> validation generally happens when
Except when it doesn’t and then you have to deal with fucking Cthulhu because everyone thought they could just make incorrect assumptions that aren’t actually enforced anywhere because “oh that never happens”.
That isn’t engineering. It’s programming by coincidence.
> Maybe Rust will finish figuring out the OsString interface
The entire reason OsString is painful to use is because those problems exist and are real. Golang drops them on the floor and forces you pick up the mess on the random day when an unlucky end user loses data. Rust forces you to confront them, as unfortunate as they are. It's painful once, and then the problem is solved for the indefinite future.
Rust also provides OsStrExt if you don’t care about portability, which greatly removes many of these issues.
I don’t know how that’s not ideal: mistakes are hard, but you can opt into better ergonomics if you don’t need the portability. If you end up needing portability later, the compiler will tell you that you can’t use the shortcuts you opted into.
Can you give an example of how Go's approach causes people to lose data? This was alluded to in the blog post but they didn't explain anything.
It seems like there's some confusion in the GGGGGP post, since Go works correctly even if the filename is not valid UTF-8 .. maybe that's why they haven't noticed any issues.
Imagine that you're writing a function that'll walk the directory to copy some files somewhere else, and then delete the directory. Unfortunately, you hit this
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/32334
oops, looks like some files are just inaccessible to you, and you cannot copy them.
Fortunately, when you try to delete the source directory, Go's standard library enters infinite loop, which saves your data.
In practice, the validation generally happens when you convert to JSON or use an HTML template or something like that, so it’s not so many places.
Validation is nice but Rust’s principled approach leaves me high and dry sometimes. Maybe Rust will finish figuring out the OsString interface and at that point we can say Rust has “won” the conversation, but it’s not there yet, and it’s been years.