The last few days I've been thinking a lot about the fact that Go does not allow circular imports. I'm not really sure of why it currently works that way, but from what I've understood the way the compiler works - which is also the reason why compilation of Go programs is much faster than other languages - makes it quite difficult to authorize circular imports.
I'm a young developer (not particularly in Go, I have only 2-3 years of experience at total) so I'm looking forward to hearing your opinion guys, but I think Go2 should allow importing packages circularly. I have no practical reason to think that, except I've been tricking many times to have a structure in my project with which I can at least build. The main reason why I'm strongly convinced forbidding circular imports is not a good thing is that it separates too much the problem space from the solution space. In Golang, the majority of the solutions we find are just the translation of the logic behind our head into a language a computer can understand - I emphasize this because it might not be true for all languages (take Prolog for instance). Most of the time when you read a well written program, you clearly get the underlying logic that led to this particular solution, AND implementation of the solution. BUT - I think that there are some cases (and not just a few) when from a logical point of view, the solution is clear, and we have to take the structure of a project away from that logic, because circular imports are not permitted. The human brain works in such a manner that circular imports make sense, and I'll get even further, they are what makes the strongest sense of all the solutions it can get to. That is my one and only point, but I personally think it is enough to at least discuss the issue. I have many questions from this point : - Has there been any discussions about that for Go2 yet? If yes, could any of you point me to them? - What do you think about what I just wrote? Is it coherent and relevant or am I missing something? - Do you see any alternative to the problem I brought here other than authorizing circular imports? - Can anyone explain me exactly why circular imports are forbidden or is this too complicated to hold in a mail? Thank you all for reading! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
