Tomáš Deml

One really interesting thing you may not have spotted in the release notes of #golang 1.21 is the following line: "Package initialization order is now specified more precisely" This is quite a big change, as it impacts how the init() function works. Previously it could be difficult to know what order the init function in different packages would be run (medium.com/@markbates/go-ini…) but this changes that. The new Algorithm is: - Sort all packages by import path. - Repeat until the list of packages is empty:Find the first package in the list for which all imports are already initialized. - Initialize that package and remove it from the list. This is a positive change, but it does mean that this is a breaking one; you should test your applications thoroughly if you are upgrading to 1.21. Does this mean we can/should use init more? I don't think so, no. Init was always been seen as anti-pattern by many and some style guides such as Thanos(thanos.io/v0.13/coding-style…) go as far a to say "no init". This is because they can cause global changes that have side-effects which can be difficult to track down . The only init function I use regularly is to setup: github.com/uber-go/automaxpr… (under the hood it calls init) How do you use init functions? Does this change change the way you think about them?