Go: Building Web Applications

Implementing the defer control mechanism

While we're here, we should take a moment and talk about defer. Go has an elegant implementation of the defer control mechanism. If you've used defer (or something functionally similar) in other languages, this will seem familiar—it's a useful way of delaying the execution of a statement until the rest of the function is complete.

For the most part, this is syntactical sugar that allows you to see related operations together, even though they won't execute together. If you've ever written something similar to the following pseudocode, you'll know what I mean:

x = file.open('test.txt')
int longFunction() {
…
}
x.close();

You probably know the kind of pain that can come from large "distances" separating related ...