Programming

Generics in Go were added about a year back in Go 1.18. In my experience they are great and they fix one of the biggest roadblocks in terms of writing reusable code in Go. I’ll illustrate that with an example. First, do ensure that you have at least Go 1.18 Bash 1 2 $ go version go version go1.19.1 darwin/amd64 Let’s consider a simple case of implementing a Map function in Go that maps an array (well, a slice) to another array (again, actually, a slice). ...

If you create GitHub Actions via GitHub’s UI by going to the URL of the form `https://github.com///actions/new`, it provides templates for setting up the build. However, the template is broken. There are four problems with the default template

Go language does not have the concept of a class directly. It, however, has a concept of an interface as well as a struct. I’ll illustrate how this can be used to build most of the inheritance constructs that a language like Java or C++ offers.

Writing tests at an early-stage startup is always heatedly debated. If a function has one call, adding a unit test doubles the number of calls, this not only doubles the current work but even slows down future code changes 2X! Further, if the code is not finalized, it is legitimate to ask why even bother writing test code. Here’s a better way to write tests

RPC calls allow one service to call functions in another service as if it is a part of the same service. And unlike a REST API, one gets strong type checking. The two services can even be in different languages. gRPC is a great framework for implementing an RPC service. Another language-agnostic framework for making RPC calls is GraphQL. Many people don’t think of GraphQL that way, however, it can serve the same purpose. ...

While trying to install a custom exception handler to catch uncaught exceptions (crashes), I ended up writing

Java made a huge mistake of having no network timeouts. A network request can block a thread forever. Even Python did the same. The language designers should have chosen some conservative appropriate numbers instead. What’s surprising is that the Go language repeated it! Here’s a simple demo

What should this code print?

Rather than pushing the code to a remote branch and then testing via Circle CI servers, it is best to run the tests locally first and make them work. Here’s how you can do that.

On Android catching Java exceptions is easy via UncaughtExceptionHandler. Catching NDK crashes is a bit more convoluted. Since the native stack is probably corrupted, you want the crash handler to run on a separate process. Also, since the system might be in an unstable shape, don’t send the crash report to your web server or do anything fancy. Just write the crash report to a file, and on the next restart of the app, send to your web server and delete it from the disk. I ended up using jndcrash package for this.