I’m a bit new to Golang, but not good programming practices. Isn’t ignoring the error value returned by a function a very bad practice in general? Regardless of if the function call returning it is used in defer? Not just for file write operations?
Ignoring errors is generally a poor practice. You don't have to stop your program on errors, but you should at least log some percentage of them so that when the failure cascades, you have some idea where the failure started.
Sometimes there is nothing you can do when there is an error, in that case there is no point in adding several layers of error forwarding until you ignore it somewhere higher up.
Is… NOT ignoring errors just not an option? I don’t get it. If you propagate errors up but not all the way to being handled, haven’t you failed in a very simple, easy to fix way? Should you have a linter catching these things?
In this case the issue is that defer is a very good way to ensure you don’t forget to close the file in any branches, but a bad way to return values (you have to set the value of a named return variable, which is one of Go’s odder features).
> Should you have a linter catching these things?
JetBrains’ GoLand will in fact warn you of this. If the error truly is immaterial you can instead do
defer func() { _ = f.Close() }()
which is verbose but explicit in its intent to ignore the error.
> […] you have to set the value of a named return variable
Ahhhh okay I see it now. I definitely prefer to not use that feature as well, and I’m surprised it’s even there given how well the rest of the language adheres to “only one way to do things”. Doubly agree that it’s a strange “hack” for forwarding the deferred return value… oof
> JetBrains’ GoLand will in fact warn you of this
Heh yeah that’s what prompted me to ask, as I noticed (and very much appreciated) these hints. 100% agree with the verbose-but-explicit example you gave, and do that myself.
