Golang gotcha #4: Implicitly ignored return values

It is possible to implicitly ignore all values returned by a go function without any compilation or even vet errors. This is demonstrated in this playground example:

https://play.golang.org/p/V0fmYKADFx

Now, I am imagine that you are asking "Why is this ever allowed? Madness, madness, insanity and lies!" or something less dramatic. Well consider the fmt.Printf usage in the example and lets take a look at the fmt.Printf signature.

'if ignorance is bliss then knock the smile off my face' - Rage Against the Machine

 

Yes, we're only bloody, implicitly ignoring that too aren't we? You see, a fair amount of the standard library relies upon this behaviour so disallowing it would break backwards compatibility :(. Though I would argue that this implicit ignoring is bad practice and should not be explicitly utilised or encouraged when it comes to user defined functions, it is an easy avenue for bugs to creep in.

In-depth discussion here.