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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

You misunderstood, parent is complaining about Go, not about Rust. In Go you would have to use a pointer to represent Option<T>, which makes code really awkward.

Go serialization really has quite a few issues apart from default initialization. Configuration by somewhat weird struct tag strings which are only evaluated/validated at runtime, de/serialization is all done via reflection (unless you want to use code generation), ...

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> In Go you would have to use a pointer to represent Option<T>, which makes code really awkward.

This sounded surprising to me, then I remembered Go doesn’t have generics. I imagine this won’t be as much of an issue when it does?

Perhaps if they were to remove the concept of nil in golang, but since they are all about backwards compatibility (which is nice to be fair), I don't think there's much change of seeing mainstream adoption because of how many existing projects will rely on default value in certain circumstances

I'd love to be proven wrong, but even with generics if you start using option types, it's going to be like JS and TypeScript where you'll have some parts nicely typed and others are the wild west

Emulating ADTs without language support/pattern matching is quite awkward. A prime example is std::optional in C++.

.map() et al only get you so far.

When extracting the value in Go you either have to return a pointer / error pair or abort. Both of which introduce awkward code patterns and potential for misuse.

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