Not that the best software is designed by consensus but I appreciate the support Mike. I like Go. Nothing is perfect. It’s amazing they were able to add generics in a backwards compatible manner. But I long for a Go 2.0 where they broke compatibility and fixed some critical errors that I suspect the core Go is well aware of. I know it won’t/can’t change - but took the opportunity to rant :)
I will second this rant.
That behavior has resulted in more bugs — that I have personally seen — than I can count on all my digits. :-(
It's handy behavior, because it let you write
x , err := method1() if err !=nil { ... } y , err := method2() instead of having to have multiple error variables.
Shadowed err variables is where shadowing has bitten me the worst. I recently wrote a linter to flag ALL variable shadowing, especially err.
No doubt, but it also increases the cognitive load at the call site - which is sort of against Go’s desire for explicitness.
No doubt, but it also increases the cognitive load at the call site - which is sort of against Go’s desire for explicitness. It's handy behavior, because it let you write
x , err := method1() if err !=nil { ... } y , err := method2() instead of having to have multiple error variables.
On Wednesday, January 14, 2026 at 9:38:39 AM UTC-8 Robert Engels wrote:
Yes, I was using shadowing loosely.
When you have
var x int
… 100 lines of code …
x,y := somefunc()
And y is a new variable - you have no idea at the call site which is a new variable and which is not.
That is the “shadowing” I’m referring to - loosely in that it obscures what is actually happening at the call site. You need to know other context - breaking Go’s desire for explicitness.
> On Jan 14, 2026, at 11:23 AM, Jan Mercl <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2026 at 6:09 PM Robert Engels <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Yes it does. You can declare new variables while assigning to old in Go.
>
> No it does not AFAICT. You wrote:
>
> """"
> ... mixing of new and old declarations with new variables possibly
> being introduced or old ones shadowed.
> """"
>
> Please show a playground program where this happens. Note: shadowing
> can happen only across blocks. The rules for short variable
> declarations apply only within one block.
>
> Caveat emptor: Go specs do not define the term "shadowing". So you may
> be using a very different definition of shadowing than most other
> people have in mind when talking about shadowing variables in Go.
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