An Introduction to Monadic Error Handing in Go

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Google’s Go programming language was one of the fastest growing languages of 2016

and is poised for explosive growth in the coming years. One of the key

features that has helped make Go a success has been it’s coherent and

simple design that focuses on straightforward, idiomatic approaches to

developing software. As the amount of production Go code begins to expand,

we may start to find limitations in some existing idioms around how Go

code is structured. For developers who want to push the boundaries of

quality in our applications, it’s vital that we understand how to

transform and adopt idioms within our code that favor quality and make

defects both apparent and difficult to create.

Many functional programming languages, especially those in the ML

language family, have a rich history of facilitating development

idioms that enforce safety on the user through programing constructs

like phantom types and monadic error handling. In this talk, we’ll look

at how we can take lessons learned from those functional languages and

apply them to our Go applications with the explicit goal of improving

application quality by reducing the potential for errors.