Things which may be of interest in Go v1.4

[Katherine Cox-Buday]

Hey All,

I just got done reading through the Go v1.4 release-notes[1], and these are
some high-level thoughts about what pieces may be of interest to Juju
development. This is certainly not comprehensive, but I thought you all
might be interested. Happy release day :)

   -
*go generate *https://golang.org/doc/go1.4#gogenerate
   This is *very* powerful and could reduce the number of copy/paste
   snippets, or unsafe reflection code we have to write. For those of you who
   are familiar with the lisps, this is essentially macros. You write code
   that examines Go expressions and does something. This code is
triggered by *//go:generate
   command arg* comments in the code. As a quick example, our StringSet
   type could be generated and even expanded to encompass any type.
   -
*New func TestMain(m *testing.M) *https://golang.org/pkg/testing/#MainStart
   Since we use gocheck and gocheck requires you to register the testing
   subsystem, this now looks like the best place to do this. Without this, you
   can run into difficult to debug behavior when filtering to certain subsets
   of tests, or duplication of registration.
   - *Canonical Import Paths*
   https://golang.org/doc/go1.4#canonicalimports
   This helps out when using the gopkg.in pattern. For libraries that are
   specific to Juju, we may want to specify this to help enforce the notion
   that we want to use gopkg.in and not github.com/* or launchpad.net/*.
   - *Internal Packages*
   https://golang.org/doc/go1.4#internalpackages
   Just what it sounds like. We can now hide implementation details from
   importers. Probably more useful for the ancillary Juju packages as Juju
   Core is probably not imported very much.

-
Katherine

[1] https://golang.org/doc/go1.4
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