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Comment by HL33tibCe7 | Hacker News Reader

Part of me agrees with you.

But part of me also sees the Go's team point on this, which is that not all functions always need their error checked - as an obvious example, fmt.Println.

Sure, the compiler could add explicit exceptions for those cases, but that's a very unclean solution and it doesn't handle third party libraries.

The "Go way" is to use the errcheck tool to do that.

And on balance I think that having that defined in a separate tool - which can be configured by the user to exclude modules of their choice, and comes with good defaults - is the correct choice.

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>not all functions always need their error checked - as an obvious example, fmt.Println.

I agree, but a lot of other languages handle this much better. In Rust (predictably!) you receive a Result type, and if you don't want to check the error you either .unwrap() it or apply the ? operator to pass it up.

I feel like making "let's not check this error" explicit rather than implicit would be an improvement. Currently in Go it's impossible to tell whether someone forgot to check an error, or if they omitted the check intentionally.

As an aside: I feel like if you are ever in a situation in which fmt.Println returns an error, then whatever situation you are in is already far, far beyond saving. Maybe fmt.Println should just panic on an error, that seems better than output silently being dropped!

> As an aside: I feel like if you are ever in a situation in which fmt.Println returns an error, then whatever situation you are in is already far, far beyond saving.

Not necessarily, it could just be that the user has closed the stream for one reason or an other. Possibly because they’re running it as a service without having set up an stdout, if the program has useful side effects.

> it's impossible to tell whether someone forgot to check an error

How, exactly, does one find themselves in a situation where they forget to add entire blocks of logic to their application and not notice? We're not exactly talking about subtle bugs here. This is completely missing functionality – something that becomes immediately obvious as soon as testing begins.

Which, I guess, means that the previous developer did no testing at all. In which case, where do you even begin to figure out what else they have forgotten? Such a codebase, no matter the language, may not even be salvageable at that point.

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