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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

I like go, but i don’t understand your point. Go seems to like passing pointers over channels, which is pretty far from avoiding shared memory. Unless you start writing code that looks like actor based concurrency, with channels used to pass messages acrross actors. But this isn’t what i’d call idiomatic go.

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> Unless you start writing code that looks like actor based concurrency, with channels used to pass messages acrross actors. But this isn’t what i’d call idiomatic go.

Isn't that exactly what Go people push? "Don't communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating" and all that. If you start pushing pointers to shared memory around then I'd expect all of the problems of traditional multithreading to reappear.

Passing pointers to shared memory is highly unsafe in Go. While the Rust borrow checker will prevent all data races, there's nothing like that wrt. Go.

> Passing pointers to shared memory is highly unsafe in Go. While the Rust borrow checker will prevent all data races, there's nothing like that wrt. Go

Passing pointers to shared memory is the foundation of a huge number of idiomatic, performant, and productive design patterns and architectures. There exist a number of conventions and tools, like the race detector, which reduce the risks of data races to entirely reasonable levels.

Passing pointers over channels doesn't necessarily mean you're sharing memory, you could be passing ownership. Pointer or value are both equally idiomatic.

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