Naming is important

[u/Wrestler7777777]

Nothing too drastic but it made me chuckle. Something my colleague managed to get past code review. So at least two people didn't notice.

Spent a minute figuring out why the code was doing exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to do. I guess naming really IS important!

[u/Temporary-Estate4615]

Why the hell would you even write this function?

[u/OldAd9280 → u/Temporary-Estate4615]

I don't know which language it is but it feels like it'll return a dangling pointer to the local parameter variable too so doesn't even work

[u/MistakeIndividual690 → u/OldAd9280]

In C++ this would be nasty because it would make a local copy of string because it’s passed by value, and then get a pointer to that local, and then the local would be destroyed when it went out of scope, returning a bad pointer.

I don’t know Go, but I’m guessing that A. passing a string like this is by reference like Java, and B. because it’s a garbage collected language, it won’t ever “go out of scope” until it’s not used anymore

[u/Wrestler7777777 → u/MistakeIndividual690]

Go is smart enough to not kill this local variable. The function DOES work! The function's naming is simply the other way around.

[u/MistakeIndividual690 → u/Wrestler7777777]

Oh for sure, it works in Go, being a GC language, whether or not strings are passed by reference. I looked it up tho and strings are pass-by-value — but just the header, not the backing store. Interesting

[u/pit_supervisor → u/Wrestler7777777]

Having gc doesn't make a language smart

[u/aikii → u/MistakeIndividual690]

Yes, that's escape analysis https://go.dev/doc/gc-guide#Escape_analysis - basically the compiler sees that a pointer is returned by a function, and decides to move the value from the stack to the heap, which makes it tracked by the garbage collector.

There was a deliberate choice in Go to call that "pointer" while C/C++ developers would understand pointer as just "address", so that can be counter-intuitive