GopherCon 2019 - On the Road to Go 2

conference, golang, gophercon2019, notes

These are some notes from my experiences at the GopherCon 2019. I don’t expect these will be laid out in any particularly useful way; I am mostly taking them so I can remember some of the bits I found most useful in the future.

Go 2 Big Topics

  • Errors
  • Generics
  • Dependencies
  • Developer tooling

Errors

  • Error values

    • Nice to enable full use of go language to extend and inspect errors
    • go1.13 – errors should have Unwrap() (similar to Cause()), handled by errors.Unwrap(err)
    • go1.13 – errors.Is(), errors.As() for handling some looping w/ Unwrap
    • go1.13 – %w formatting for error wrapping w/ fmt.Errorf()

  • Error syntax

    • abadoned check and try (woo!)

Generics

  • contract-based design from last year still experimenting, but not settled
  • latest design presented Friday morning

Dependencies

  • History

    • just go distribution (but no easy custom packages)

    • GOPATH (but no versioning)

    • Go vendoring (copy dependencies into your tree without hacks)

      • But lost package uniqueness

    • Dep – hoping to unify various other tools

      • But supported incompatible changes to a dep w/o changing import paths

    • Vgo / Go Modules – restore “New API == new import path”

      • But no more GOPATH
      • But we do get more reproducible builds as a result of no more GOPATH
      • Separates VCS from packages, so proxies are now viable
      • go1.13 will use the google proxy by default in modules mode

Developer Tools

  • Probably a focus after the other 3 topics when there aren’t a lot of language changes on deck
  • E.g., gopls
  • Probably fix and vet after