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Pop quiz: what time was it?
Here’s a small quiz derived from some incorrect advice from an AI coding assistant.
Dave Cheney
@dave-cheney
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Posts by Dave Cheney
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Microblog: TestMain can cause one to question reality
This morning a one line change had several of us tearing up the fabric of reality trying to understand why a failing test wasn’t failing, or, in fact, being run at all. Increasingly frantic efforts to upgrade/downgrade Go, run the tests on another machine, run the tests in CI, all served to only...
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A few bytes here, a few there, pretty soon you’re talking real memory
Today’s post comes from a recent Go pop quiz. Consider this benchmark fragment.1
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The story of the one line fix
Picture yourself, an engineer working at the hottest distributed microservices de jour, assigned to fix a bug. You jump into an unfamiliar codebase and quickly locate the line where the problem occurred. The fix is simple, just return early or substitute a default value in the case that one canno...
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How to dump the GOSSAFUNC graph for a method
The Go compiler’s SSA backend contains a facility to produce HTML debugging output of the compilation phases. This post covers how to print the SSA output for function and methods.
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Diamond interface composition in Go 1.14
Per the overlapping interfaces proposal, Go 1.14 now permits embedding of interfaces with overlapping method sets. This is a brief post explain what this change means:
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Fatih’s question
A few days ago Fatih posted this question on twitter.
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Ensmallening Go binaries by prohibiting comparisons
Conventional wisdom dictates that the larger the number of types declared in a Go program, the larger the resulting binary. Intuitively this makes sense, after all, what’s the point in defining a bunch of types if you’re not going to write code that operates on them. However, part of the job of a...
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Mid-stack inlining in Go
In the previous post I discussed how leaf inlining allows the Go compiler to reduce the overhead of function calls and extend optimisation opportunities across function boundaries. In this post I’ll discuss the limits of inlining and leaf vs mid-stack inlining.
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Inlining optimisations in Go
This is a post about how the Go compiler implements inlining and how this optimisation affects your Go code.
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go test -v streaming output
The testing package is one of my favourite packages in the Go standard library, not just because of its low noise approach to unit testing, but, over the lifetime of Go, it has received a steady stream of quality of life improvements driven by real world usage.
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Are large slices more expensive than smaller ones?
Programmers have a tendency to be superstitious. Particularly, when a programmer hears that copies are expensive, they start to see them everywhere, especially when they learn that, in Go, every assignment is a copy.
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The Zen of Go
This article was derived from my GopherCon Israel 2020 presentation. It’s also quite long. If you’d prefer a shorter version, head over to the-zen-of-go.netlify.com.
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Dynamically scoped variables in Go
This is a thought experiment in API design. It starts with the classic Go unit testing idiom:
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Internets of Interest #15: The Queen of the Skies
If, like me, you’re a commercial aviation otaku, this walkthrough of an enthusiast built 747 cockpit simulator should be highly relevant to your interests.
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Complementary engineering indicators
Last year I had the opportunity to watch Cat Swetel’s presentation The Development Metrics You Should Use (but Don’t). The information that could be gleaned from just tracking the start and finish date of work items was eye opening. If you’re using an issue tracker this information is probably al...
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Internets of interest: Warner Losh on the first ten years of UNIX
UNIX turns 50 this year which means 7th edition Research UNIX is that 40.
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Use internal packages to reduce your public API surface
In the beginning, before the go tool, before Go 1.0, the Go distribution stored the standard library in a subdirectory called pkg/ and the commands which built upon it in cmd/. This wasn’t so much a deliberate taxonomy but a by product of the original make based build system. In September 2014, t...