I'm confused about why we're comparing GOTO control flow with channels, since they're completely unrelated. I guess you can make a mess with each when you use them inappropriately? With GOTO, you should avoid it because there are better options (notably, conditional statements).
Unlike GOTO, there isn't really a better alternative for synchronizing parallel programs. Parallel programming (or even concurrent programming, for that matter) is just harder than sequential programming, and if you don't know what you're doing (regardless of whether you use channels or not) you're going to end up with a mess. Channels help to tame parallel programs, but they can't compensate for programmers who don't know how to write correct parallel programs.
And while Rust can prevent against data races, data races are a tiny sliver of parallel programming bugs. Far more common are race conditions and deadlocks, against which Rust is powerless.
> I greatly prefer programs that “color” functions sync/async, and that use small state machines to coordinate shared state only when necessary.
Async/await similarly doesn't solve the problem of undisciplined programmers making a mess. If you give undisciplined programmers async/await and shared state, they'll make a mess as easily as they will with goroutines and channels. If you're hiring people who can't be trusted with shared memory parallelism, then you have to take away parallelism or mutability or you have to train them to write correct parallel programs.
Unlike GOTO, there isn't really a better alternative for synchronizing parallel programs. Parallel programming (or even concurrent programming, for that matter) is just harder than sequential programming, and if you don't know what you're doing (regardless of whether you use channels or not) you're going to end up with a mess. Channels help to tame parallel programs, but they can't compensate for programmers who don't know how to write correct parallel programs.
And while Rust can prevent against data races, data races are a tiny sliver of parallel programming bugs. Far more common are race conditions and deadlocks, against which Rust is powerless.
> I greatly prefer programs that “color” functions sync/async, and that use small state machines to coordinate shared state only when necessary.
Async/await similarly doesn't solve the problem of undisciplined programmers making a mess. If you give undisciplined programmers async/await and shared state, they'll make a mess as easily as they will with goroutines and channels. If you're hiring people who can't be trusted with shared memory parallelism, then you have to take away parallelism or mutability or you have to train them to write correct parallel programs.