Go structs are copied on assignment (and other things about Go I'd missed)

Post by surfingdino » Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 8:43 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #24

Attummm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think that the idea that programmers should know everything is kinda bizarre. Programming is about finding the answer. If you already knew everything, you could just sit down and type any program from your knowledge. We all know that you can't know everything otherwise, why even write documentation or use git? Unfortunately, it's difficult to move past this idea, and it's so pervasive that stating "I do…

Right! The best thing about our chosen career is that it's completely impossible to know everything - there's always a new corner of software engineering to dig into, be it how the Linux kernel works, or programming with Haskell, understanding Transformer LLM architectures, or how the Svelte compiler works or whatever.

Post by iainmerrick » Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 8:47 AM UTC

matrix87 wrote: post #37

simonw wrote: post #10

One of the many things I find inspiring about Julia is how quick she is to admit to mistakes she has made or things that she hasn't understood. If she didn't understand it, I can 100% guarantee that there are large numbers of people out there who also didn't understand it - many of whom were probably too embarrassed to ever admit it. I think this is a useful trait for senior software engineers generally. If you're a…

most of the time when people don't ask questions in industry, it isn't because they already know the answers, it's because they don't care what the answers are blogging is culturally different because there's way more exhibitionism involved

Post by usrbinbash » Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 8:59 AM UTC

    thing := Thing{...}
    other_thing := thing
    pinter_to_same_thing := &thing

Post by mariozski » Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 9:12 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #53

The semantics of when stuff is copied, moved, or passed by reference are all over the place in language design. C started with the idea that functions returned one int-sized value in a register. This led to classic bugs where the function returns a pointer to a local value. Compilers now usually catch this. C eventually got structure return by copy. Then C++ added return value by move, and automatic optimization for…

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 9:19 AM UTC

jerf wrote: post #15

zuzuleinen wrote: post #4

To generalize the title into a rule is good to remember that in Go everything is passed by value(copy).

That is the case for almost every modern language. C++ is one of the few languages that has "references" and at least last I looked that's a language accommodation over what are pointers being passed by value in the assembly, at least until compiler optimizations take over (and that's not limited to references either). If you're in 2024 and you're in some programming class making a big deal about pass-by-value versus…