this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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[–] flame3244 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yes it is a hard error and Go does not compile then. You can do _ = foobar to fake variable usage. I think this is okay for testing purposes.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think that's even worse because it increases the likelihood you'll forget you faked that variable just for testing

[–] flame3244 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Worse than not having a unused variable check at all? Dunno, the underscore assignment are very visible for me and stand out on every code read and review.

[–] AeonFelis 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yes, worse, because now if you want to use the underscore assignment to indicate that you really want to discard that variable - it gets confused with underscore assignments that were put there "temporarily" for experimentation purpose.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Exactly.

Say I'm having some issue with a function. I comment out half the function to see if that's where the weirdness is. Golang says "unused variable, I refuse to compile this dogshit!" I completely fool Golang by just using _ = foo. Yes, I was correct, that's where the problem was. I rewrite that section of the code, and test it out, things work perfectly. Only now, it turns out I'm not using foo anymore, and Golang has no idea because I so cleverly fooled it with _ = foo.

Now, something that could be caught by a linter and expressed as a warning is missed by the language police entirely, and may make it into production code.

Police the code that people put into a repository / share with others. Don't police the code that people just want to test on their own.

[–] nomadjoanne 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ew, that's awful. Go is not one of my programming languages but I had always held it in high esteem because Ken Thompson and Rob Pike were involved in it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

That's the main reason it has had any success. It's not that it's a good language, it's just that it has good references.

[–] flame3244 1 points 1 year ago

Honestly, it does not happen often that I have a ln unused variable that I want to keep. In my mind it is the same thing when wanting to call a function that does not exists. Also my editor is highlighting error Long before I try to compile, so this is fine too for me.

[–] AstridWipenaugh 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The underscore is used in production code too. It's a legitimate way to tell the compiler to discard the object because you don't intend to use the pointer/value.