Book Image

Learning Functional Programming in Go

By : Lex Sheehan
Book Image

Learning Functional Programming in Go

By: Lex Sheehan

Overview of this book

Lex Sheehan begins slowly, using easy-to-understand illustrations and working Go code to teach core functional programming (FP) principles such as referential transparency, laziness, recursion, currying, and chaining continuations. This book is a tutorial for programmers looking to learn FP and apply it to write better code. Lex guides readers from basic techniques to advanced topics in a logical, concise, and clear progression. The book is divided into four modules. The first module explains the functional style of programming: pure functional programming, manipulating collections, and using higher-order functions. In the second module, you will learn design patterns that you can use to build FP-style applications. In the next module, you will learn FP techniques that you can use to improve your API signatures, increase performance, and build better cloud-native applications. The last module covers Category Theory, Functors, Monoids, Monads, Type classes and Generics. By the end of the book, you will be adept at building applications the FP way.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

How to propose changes to Go


I am certain that Generics are not supported in Go (not even in Go 2.0), and as mentioned in the summary, I'm okay with that.

However, the feature that we'd benefit most greatly from, if Go had it, is Tail Call Optimization (TCO).

The first step - search specs

Is it possible that Go already supports TCO? Time to find out.

First, I looked at the Go language specification for any mention of a TCO feature (https://golang.org/ref/spec).

I found nothing about TCO.

Second step - Google search

Next, I did the requisite Google search, and found this:

The official Golang change proposal process

Then, I learned about the process of proposing changes to Go (https://github.com/golang/proposal/).

Search for existing issues

Here's the process.

First, visit https://github.com/golang/go/issues  and search the language feature you'd like to be added to go, for example, type tail call optimization, as shown in the following screenshot:

Reading existing proposals

I clicked on the line (with...