I’ve been working primarily in Go for the past five years, including some extremely complex projects, and I have never once wished I had dependency injection. It has been wonderful. I have used dependency injection - previously I worked on a C# project for years, and that used DI - but I adore Go’s simplicity and I never want to use anything else (except for JS for UI, via Electron or Wails for desktop).
Edit: If we’re talking about dependency injection in the general sense (separation of concerns, modularization, loose coupling), then yeah I agree that’s kind of critical to writing good, maintainable software. When I hear “dependency injection” I think of frameworks such as Unity, and that is what I was specifically talking about - I am very happy with the fact that I have felt zero need to use any framework like that over the last five years.
Go programmer here: What does Go’s simplicity have to do with dependency injection? What does a language itself have to do with dependency injection?
Reading your post and not being personally familiar with your work, I do wonder, perhaps your “extremely complex projects” wouldn’t be so extremely complex if you practiced dependency injection?
How do you unit test your extremely complex projects if your business logic carries the additional responsibility of creating objects?
What does Go’s simplicity have to do with dependency injection?
In my experience, following Go’s philosophy of simple solutions eliminates the need for complex solutions such as dependency injection.
How do you unit test your extremely complex projects if your business logic carries the additional responsibility of creating objects?
I write modular code that accepts interfaces so I can test the components I want to test. The vast majority of object creation happens at initialization time, not in the business logic. For the projects I’ve worked on, that would be true with or without DI - I don’t see how that’s relevant.
perhaps your “extremely complex projects” wouldn’t be so extremely complex if you practiced dependency injection?
When the CTO says, “Make it distributed and sharded,” I do what I’m told, but that is an intrinsically complex problem. The complexity is in the overall behavior of the system. If you zoom in to the individual execution units, the business logic is relatively simple. But the behavior of the system as a whole is rather complex, and DI isn’t going to change that.
Edit: I was interpreting “using DI” to mean using a DI framework such as Unity, and I would be happy to never need one of those frameworks ever again.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what “dependency injection” means. When I hear “dependency injection” I think of a DI framework such as Unity, so I thought “using DI” meant using one of those frameworks.
I say it’s all about data flow and composability, if it’s pretty much always in one direction (modular tree structure/architecture) then you just don’t need all these “patterns”…
(I think Go takes all mediocre language features together and makes an even more mediocre language TBH, take error handling for example, or generic programming (which I agree should be used sparingly, but is super useful if you need it))
Go does have generics nowadays, although they have some limitations (like pointer types being inefficient because reasons).
But yeah I’d tend to agree. Go’s strength and explicit design goal is that it’s relatively easy to learn and get started with, meaning it’s fast to onboard new devs. It’s very much a “get shit done” language.
It’s weakness is – to paraphrase someone criticism of Go – the core dev team’s extreme unwillingness to adopt any programming language and tool chain designs and patterns invented after the 70’s. Pike’s rationale against generics was that in cases where you’d normally reach for generics you can either use interfaces (and especially interface{} which is like Go’s void* and throws all type information out the window and is slower than proper types because reasons), or just copy and paste code. Because what you as a developer want to do is reimplement something like Find(needle SomeType, haystack []SomeType) for the Nth time in every project, or take a performance hit and lose all type information by using interface{}.
And don’t even get me started on how long it took for Go to get proper dependency management and what the arguments against it were, Jesus fuck.
Go is currently the language I’m most fluent in after having written mostly Go for something like 8 years or even more (I remember when error was Error, pre 1.0 I think) and the one I’d be the most productive in, which is sort of unfortunate since I really don’t like it as a language 😁 Learning Julia at the moment though, since I’m going back to the university to study some more computer science and maybe get into evolutionary algorithm research, and Julia is a neat language for lots of different number crunch-y tasks (no I won’t touch Python, significant whitespace is a crime against common sense and fully dynamic typing gives me the heebie jeebies)
I’ve heard of Rust. It sounds noisy and even more verbose than Go, which is already a fairly verbose language. I haven’t had any reason to learn Rust, so I haven’t done so. The error handling is annoying but at this point I don’t really notice it any more. And as interolivary said, Go has generics now.
Yeah this was my initial reaction way back when I first heard of Rust as well (sometime around 2015 or so I think). TBF it’s definitely not on the same level as e.g. Haskell. But it’s generally I would say less verbose than go (or at least has verboseness where it makes sense compared to go IMHO).
The generic system is also (way) less powerful compared to Rusts (The trait type system/type-classes is really a nice Haskell-inspired thing, that I don’t want to miss anymore). Also the lack of sum types and proper pattern matching makes go more verbose IMHO.
*grumble*. I dabbled in Scala a few years back and I am really grumpy every time I remember that Go doesn’t have sum types, pattern matching, and the closed union of types construction you can create with an abstract final class in Scala. I loved that last one and used the heck out of it. I would love to have a compiler-enforced guarantee that a set of types was closed and could not be extended.
I mean unit tests. I work on Spring Boot apps where there are distinct layers (controller -> service -> persistence), and you generally inject mocks into your object to isolate tests to the specific code you want under test. One benefit of this approach is that it’s pretty easy to get 90% coverage.
I’ve been working primarily in Go for the past five years, including some extremely complex projects, and I have never once wished I had dependency injection. It has been wonderful. I have used dependency injection - previously I worked on a C# project for years, and that used DI - but I adore Go’s simplicity and I never want to use anything else (except for JS for UI, via Electron or Wails for desktop).
Edit: If we’re talking about dependency injection in the general sense (separation of concerns, modularization, loose coupling), then yeah I agree that’s kind of critical to writing good, maintainable software. When I hear “dependency injection” I think of frameworks such as Unity, and that is what I was specifically talking about - I am very happy with the fact that I have felt zero need to use any framework like that over the last five years.
Go programmer here: What does Go’s simplicity have to do with dependency injection? What does a language itself have to do with dependency injection?
Reading your post and not being personally familiar with your work, I do wonder, perhaps your “extremely complex projects” wouldn’t be so extremely complex if you practiced dependency injection?
How do you unit test your extremely complex projects if your business logic carries the additional responsibility of creating objects?
In my experience, following Go’s philosophy of simple solutions eliminates the need for complex solutions such as dependency injection.
I write modular code that accepts interfaces so I can test the components I want to test. The vast majority of object creation happens at initialization time, not in the business logic. For the projects I’ve worked on, that would be true with or without DI - I don’t see how that’s relevant.
When the CTO says, “Make it distributed and sharded,” I do what I’m told, but that is an intrinsically complex problem. The complexity is in the overall behavior of the system. If you zoom in to the individual execution units, the business logic is relatively simple. But the behavior of the system as a whole is rather complex, and DI isn’t going to change that.
Edit: I was interpreting “using DI” to mean using a DI framework such as Unity, and I would be happy to never need one of those frameworks ever again.
basically dependency injection
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what “dependency injection” means. When I hear “dependency injection” I think of a DI framework such as Unity, so I thought “using DI” meant using one of those frameworks.
I say it’s all about data flow and composability, if it’s pretty much always in one direction (modular tree structure/architecture) then you just don’t need all these “patterns”…
… until you’ve heard of Rust :)
(I think Go takes all mediocre language features together and makes an even more mediocre language TBH, take error handling for example, or generic programming (which I agree should be used sparingly, but is super useful if you need it))
Go does have generics nowadays, although they have some limitations (like pointer types being inefficient because reasons).
But yeah I’d tend to agree. Go’s strength and explicit design goal is that it’s relatively easy to learn and get started with, meaning it’s fast to onboard new devs. It’s very much a “get shit done” language.
It’s weakness is – to paraphrase someone criticism of Go – the core dev team’s extreme unwillingness to adopt any programming language and tool chain designs and patterns invented after the 70’s. Pike’s rationale against generics was that in cases where you’d normally reach for generics you can either use interfaces (and especially
interface{}which is like Go’svoid*and throws all type information out the window and is slower than proper types because reasons), or just copy and paste code. Because what you as a developer want to do is reimplement something likeFind(needle SomeType, haystack []SomeType)for the Nth time in every project, or take a performance hit and lose all type information by usinginterface{}.And don’t even get me started on how long it took for Go to get proper dependency management and what the arguments against it were, Jesus fuck.
Go is currently the language I’m most fluent in after having written mostly Go for something like 8 years or even more (I remember when
errorwasError, pre 1.0 I think) and the one I’d be the most productive in, which is sort of unfortunate since I really don’t like it as a language 😁 Learning Julia at the moment though, since I’m going back to the university to study some more computer science and maybe get into evolutionary algorithm research, and Julia is a neat language for lots of different number crunch-y tasks (no I won’t touch Python, significant whitespace is a crime against common sense and fully dynamic typing gives me the heebie jeebies)I’ve heard of Rust. It sounds noisy and even more verbose than Go, which is already a fairly verbose language. I haven’t had any reason to learn Rust, so I haven’t done so. The error handling is annoying but at this point I don’t really notice it any more. And as interolivary said, Go has generics now.
Yeah this was my initial reaction way back when I first heard of Rust as well (sometime around 2015 or so I think). TBF it’s definitely not on the same level as e.g. Haskell. But it’s generally I would say less verbose than go (or at least has verboseness where it makes sense compared to go IMHO).
A good article about this: https://matklad.github.io/2023/01/26/rusts-ugly-syntax.html
The generic system is also (way) less powerful compared to Rusts (The trait type system/type-classes is really a nice Haskell-inspired thing, that I don’t want to miss anymore). Also the lack of sum types and proper pattern matching makes go more verbose IMHO.
*grumble*. I dabbled in Scala a few years back and I am really grumpy every time I remember that Go doesn’t have sum types, pattern matching, and the closed union of types construction you can create with an abstract final class in Scala. I loved that last one and used the heck out of it. I would love to have a compiler-enforced guarantee that a set of types was closed and could not be extended.
How do you write tests?
How does dependency injection have anything to do with writing tests? I write tests by writing a test function that executes the code I want to test…
I mean unit tests. I work on Spring Boot apps where there are distinct layers (controller -> service -> persistence), and you generally inject mocks into your object to isolate tests to the specific code you want under test. One benefit of this approach is that it’s pretty easy to get 90% coverage.
Do you write unit tests with objects mocked via interfaces? Or polymorphism via interfaces? Those are the main reasons to use DI.
I guess I have to start calling function invocation with generic parameters, fancy names (like “dependency injection” ^^)
Relevant:
I also prefer the simpler explanation.
https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2006/dependency-injection-demystified
As I read somewhere:
Yea that works too.
I use various strategies depending on what seems appropriate, including the two you mention. I’ve never felt the lack of DI.