Bar overriding predeclared Go identifiers

mcandre · December 10, 2017, 5:50pm

The existence of this tool seems to indicate a safety/security risk in Go:

nishanths/predeclared/blob/master/README.md

# predeclared [![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/nishanths/predeclared.svg?branch=master)](https://travis-ci.org/nishanths/predeclared)

Find code that overrides one of Go's predeclared identifiers (`new`, `make`, `append`, etc.).

The list of predeclared identifiers can be found in the [spec](https://golang.org/ref/spec#Predeclared_identifiers).

It checks the following code by default:

```
package names
named imports
type names
variables and constants
function names
method receivers
parameters
named returns
labels
```

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There are plenty of other identifiers one could use, so I would prefer that the Go compiler lean towards safety and prohibit overriding the definitions of these critical identifiers.

calmh · December 10, 2017, 6:08pm

Have you run into some real world situation where this is a problem? Or what is the security risk?

Having them as predeclared identifiers instead of keywords, and thus allowing redefinition of them in smaller scopes, means that new ones can be introduced and not break existing code. This is valuable.

system · March 10, 2018, 6:08pm

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