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Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

Seconding this. Go also has some opinionated standard libraries (want to differentiate between header casings in http requests because your clients/downstream services do? Go fuck yourself!) and shies you away from doing hacky, ugly, dangerous things you need in a systems language.

It’s absolutely an applications language.

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> and shies you away from doing hacky, ugly, dangerous things you need in a systems language.

But... You end up doing hacky and ugly things all the time because Go is such a restricted language with so many opinions about what should and should not be done. Generics alone...

Meanwhile in the real world, the protocol authors agree with Go, and HTTP/2 and onward force lower case headers on everyone.

Headers are case-sensitive?

They aren't, but because you can send Foo-Bar as fOo-BaR on the wire, someone somewhere depends on it. People don't read the specs, they look at the example data, and decide that's how their program works now.

Postel's Law allows this. A different law might say "if anything is invalid or weird, reject it instantly" and there would be a lot less security bugs. But we also wouldn't have TCP or HTTP.

No, and that wasn't the claim being made. The claim being made was that there can be engineering value in preserving the case of existing headers.

Example: An HTTP proxy that preserves the case of HTTP headers is going to cause less breakage than one that changes them. In a perfect world, it would make no difference, but that isn't the world we live in.

Are you sure they are discarded and unrecoverable? Can't that be simply recovered by using textproto.MIMEHeader and iterating over the header map?

Seems that it could be a middleware away, I don't see the big deal if so.

You may well be right -- I don't know Go at all, and just assumed the parent post's claim is true.

Only per the HTTP spec, and this is the same misunderstanding that the golang developers have. Because it's so common to preserve header casing as requests traverse networks in the real world, many users' applications or even developers' APIs depend on header casing whether intentionally or not. So if you want to interact with them, or proxy them, you probably can't use Go to do so (ok, actually you can, but you have to go down to the TCP level and abandon their http request library).

Go makes the argument that they can format your headers in canonicalized casing because casing shouldn't matter per the HTTP spec. That's fine for applications I guess, though still kind of an overreach given they have added code to modify your headers in a particular way you might not want to spend cycles on - but unacceptable for a systems language/infrastructure implementation.

I thin you wanted to say that headers are not case sensitive according to the HTTP spec, but some clients and servers do treat header names as case-sensitive in practice.

What Go does here is kinda moot nowadays, since HTTP/2.0 and HTTP/3.0 force all header names into lower-case, so they would also break non-conformant clients and servers.

That is in fact what I meant to say, and I thought I said it. Anyway, HTTP/1.1 is still in use a lot of places.

I think most people here don’t have any experience building for the kind of use cases I’m considering here (imagine a proxy like Envoy, which btw does give you at least the option to configure header casing transformations). When you have customers that can’t be forced to behave in a certain way up/down stream, you have to deal with this kind of stuff.

The Go standard library is probably being too opinionated here, but it's in line with the general worse-is-better philosophy behind Go: simplicity of implementation is more important than correctness of interface. In this case, the interface can even be claimed to be correct (according to the spec), but it cannot cover all use-cases.

If my memory serves me right, we did use Traefik at work in the past, and I remember having this issue with some legacy clients, which didn't expect headers to be transformed. Or perhaps the issue was with Envoy (which converts everything to lowercase by default, but does allow a great deal of customization).

Wait, are the headers canonicalized if you retrieve them from r.Header where r is a request?

I mean, if the safest is to conform to the html spec, there should be an escape hatch for the rarer cases easier than going all the way to the tcp level?

It's been a while since I battled this but IIRC, you can set unconcalized headers on requests you serialize yourself (for egress) with a simple workaround (directly add the header to the request's header map rather than the setter function) but if you use Go's default http handler libraries, it "helpfully" canonicalizes headers for you when it deserializes incoming requests and then invokes your http handler. So you are unable to access to the original casing that way, unless you instead use a TCP server.

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