yeah but which is faster and easier for a person to look at and understand. Go's intentionally verbose so that more complicated things are easier to understand.
What's the "?" doing? Why doesn't it compile without it? It's there to shortcut using match and handling errors and using unwrap, which makes sense if you know Rust, but the verbosity of go is its strength, not a weakness. My belief is that it makes things easier to reason about outside of the trivial example here.
If you reject the concept of a 'return on error-variant else unwrap' operator, that's fine, I guess. But I don't think most people get especially hung up on that.
> What's the "?" doing? Why doesn't it compile without it?
I don't understand this line of thought at all. "You have to learn the language's syntax to understand it!"...and so what? All programming language syntax needs to be learned to be understood. I for one was certainly not born with C-style syntax rattling around in my brain.
To me, a lot of the discussion about learning/using Rust has always sounded like the consternation of some monolingual English speakers when trying to learn other languages, right down to the "what is this hideous sorcery mark that I have to use to express myself correctly" complaints about things like diacritics.
I don't really see it as any more or less verbose.
If I return Result<T, E> from a function in Rust I have to provide an exhaustive match of all the cases, unless I use `.unwrap()` to get the success value (or panic), or use the `?` operator to return the error value (possibly converting it with an implementation of `std::From`).
No more verbose than Go, from the consumer side. Though, a big difference is that match/if/etc are expressions and I can assign results from them, so it would look more like
let a = match do_thing(&foo) {
Ok(res) => res,
Err(e) => return e
}
instead of:
a, err := do_thing(foo)
if err != nil {
return err // (or wrap it with fmt.Errorf and continue the madness
// of stringly-typed errors, unless you want to write custom
// Error types which now is more verbose and less safe than Rust).
}
I use Go on a regular basis, error handling works, but quite frankly it's one of the weakest parts of the language. Would I say I appreciate the more explicit handling from both it and Rust? Sure, unchecked exceptions and constant stack unwinding to report recoverable errors wasn't a good idea. But you're not going to have me singing Go's praise when others have done it better.
Do not get me started on actually handling errors in Go, either. errors.As() is a terrible API to work around the lack of pattern matching in Go, and the extra local variables you need to declare to use it just add line noise.
