Targeted Go version: 1.18

Author(s): Changkun Ou

Permalink: https://golang.design/research/generic-option

The widely used self-referential function pattern as options, originally proposed by Rob Pike¹, allows us to design a flexible set of APIs to help arbitrary configurations and initialization of a struct. However, when such a pattern is cumbersome when we use one option to support multiple types. This article investigates how the latest Go generics design could empower a refreshed “generic” functional options pattern and show what improvements in the future version of Go could better support such a pattern.

Author(s): Changkun Ou

Permalink: https://golang.design/research/ultimate-channel

Recently, I have been rethinking the programming patterns regarding graphics applications, and already wrote a 3D graphics package in Go, called polyred. While I was designing the rendering pipeline APIs, a tricky deadlock struggled with me for a while and led to creating an unbounded channel as a workaround solution eventually.

Author(s): Changkun Ou

Permalink: https://golang.design/research/cgo-handle

In the Go 1.17 release, we contributed a new cgo facility runtime/cgo.Handle in order to help future cgo applications better and easier to build concurrent-safe applications while passing pointers between Go and C. This article will guide us through the feature by asking what the feature offers to us, why we need such a facility, and how exactly we contributed to the implementation eventually.

Author(s): Changkun Ou

Permalink: https://golang.design/research/zero-alloc-call-sched

GUI programming in Go is a little bit tricky. The infamous issue regarding interacting with legacy, GUI frameworks is that most graphics related APIs must be called from the main thread. The issue violates the concurrent nature of Go: A goroutine maybe arbitrarily and randomly scheduled or rescheduled on different running threads, i.e., the same piece of code will be called from different threads over time, even without evolving the go keyword.

Author(s): Changkun Ou

Permalink: https://golang.design/research/pointer-params

We are aware that using pointers for passing parameters can avoid data copy, which will benefit the performance. Nevertheless, there are always some edge cases we might need concern.

Author(s): Changkun Ou

Permalink: https://golang.design/research/bench-time

About six months ago, I did a presentation¹ that talks about how to conduct a reliable benchmark⁴ in Go. Recently, I submitted an issue #41641² to the Go project, which is also a subtle issue that you might need to address in some cases.