Comment by brobinson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brobinson | Hacker News Reader

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You can easily cause a C/Go program to crash/abort due to runtime type errors. If you've written C, you've miscast something at some point. Go in particular relies extremely heavily on runtime reflection. Both languages have poor type systems.

Go's race detector is useful and we've caught bugs using it, but it's nicer when the compiler prevents you from having those bugs in the first place.

>quite good concurrency primitives

That's gonna be a "yikes" from me, dog: https://www.jtolio.com/2016/03/go-channels-are-bad-and-you-s...

I'm not a Rust fanboy, I simply like languages where it's more difficult to represent invalid state (Haskell, Ocaml, Rust, etc.) than in the mainstream languages I suffer with in my job on a daily basis. Rust happens to have great tooling and is the most likely to make inroads on these issues I care about (runtime stability + code correctness via good type system).

Go doesn’t rely heavily on runtime reflection. Putting it in the same category as C or JS is disingenuous. Rust has a great static type system, but I’ve never seen a Go program fail on a runtime/reflection type error before.

I'm not sure what to say. Go code (stdlib, popular libraries, etc.) uses runtime reflection _everywhere_. I've been using Go since 1.2 and I've seen too many runtime crashes due to type errors to count.

It is used for things like printf and JSON marshaling. I’ve been using Go regularly since 2012 and this isn’t a real problem. The reflection in the standard lib and popular third party libs (and most unpopular third party libs for that matter) is rock solid. Moreover, reflection probably accounts for less than 1% of Go code—not sure where you’re getting “everywhere” from. So I guess I’m calling your bluff.

Even if your claim of "probably ... less than 1% of Go code" is accurate, appearing somewhat less often than 1 out of every 100 lines of code is _everywhere_ to me...

To be clear, I didn't say "less than 1 out of every 100 lines", but in any case I don't consider yours to be a reasonable definition of "everywhere". Especially since such a low frequency doesn't support your claim that "you see runtime type errors too many times to count". Perhaps you're using libraries that are far, far below the ecosystem's average quality?

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