Dear all,
I've just finished supervising three fourth year students doing
a month-long summer project in Go. I thought some of you might be
interested in my conclusions.
The students were decent C programmers but had more experience with Java
(and I am not an experienced Go programmer myself). After a few days of
frustration, they had accepted that one does not build complex class
hierarchies in Go, and that one should just start writing code straight
away. They did attempt to write complex frameworks for channel
communication, I blame Java.
Surprisingly enough, they had no issue at all with = vs. :=.
They did find slices difficult to grasp. In particular, they thought
that slices alleviated the need for circular buffers, which obviously
caused massive memory leaks. Half an hour drawing boxes on a blackboard
solved this particular problem.
They did find the behavious of defer confusing -- they expected it to be
lexically scoped. They initially wrote code such as the following:
for .... {
conn, err = net.Dial(...)
defer conn.Close()
...
}
and were surprised that it caused a descriptor leak -- they were
expecting the defer to execute at the end of the enclosing block.
They did find it surprising that multiple goroutines could write to the
same channel at the same time. In order to implement a fan-in, they
initially built a slice of channels and did a reflect.Select in the
reader. They were delighted to learn that they could use a single
channel and no select was necessary.
One of them started using closures straight away, and even stored
closures in dictionaries. (They had had some exposure to Caml.)
To my surprise, they wrote a fair amount of weakly-typed code (using
interface{}). Some of it was simulating generics, so I asked them to
write it monomorphically (the collection structure they implemented is
only used at one type in this particular program). Much of it, however,
was for good reasons, so perhaps this is a consequence of the problem
being solved here.
Oh -- and I never managed to convince them that a Makefile is not needed.
In case you're interested, the code is at
https://github.com/Vivena/babelweb2
and an online demo (somewhat boring right now) is running at
http://babelweb.wifi.pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr:8080/
-- Juliusz
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