Why does Golang get the units wrong when multiplying Durations

[christophberger]

@Martin

Adding 10in + 10cm is not a challenge — they are both lengths and the result is a length. There is no such type as “metric length” or “imperial length” — there are just lengths

There have been spectacular accidents and incidents based on using the wrong unit - rockets that crashed, or the case of the “Gimli glider”. Yes, adding two values of different units can be a challenge. Wasn’t your initial complaint that Go does not handle units correctly?

@Martin

the problem is that those rules are not appropriate for non-number types, so, in my view, it was a mistake to base Duration on int64. It should have been based on struct.

Agreed, Duration could have been designed more closely to the “real world”. Again, this is not a problem of the core language and its type system but rather of the time package.