Yeah I love rust’s todo!() macro for this. Not only does it throw an error, but it also typechecks in any context. Normally a function needs to actually return whatever it says it will return. But throw a todo!() in there, and you don’t need to return anything at all. (I assume there’s some type magic going on behind the scenes. Whatever it is, I love it.)
But generally I agree that it’s overly persnickety to complain about empty functions. My use case for them is that sometimes you need to pass a function as an argument and the function may be null - to indicate you don’t want to do any work. It’s often cleaner to use an empty function as a default value rather than add null checks everywhere.
I don’t use eslint at all because of defaults like this. Having my coding style negged by a tool feels awful. I hate gofmt. I ran it once and it deleted a bunch of empty lines in my code that I had put in on purpose to aid readability. And wow, that pissed me right off! I just know I’ll hate a lot of eslint’s rules just as much. 30 years of coding experience gives you opinions. Kids these days don’t even know how to use the ternary operator properly.
josephg|2 years ago
But generally I agree that it’s overly persnickety to complain about empty functions. My use case for them is that sometimes you need to pass a function as an argument and the function may be null - to indicate you don’t want to do any work. It’s often cleaner to use an empty function as a default value rather than add null checks everywhere.
I don’t use eslint at all because of defaults like this. Having my coding style negged by a tool feels awful. I hate gofmt. I ran it once and it deleted a bunch of empty lines in my code that I had put in on purpose to aid readability. And wow, that pissed me right off! I just know I’ll hate a lot of eslint’s rules just as much. 30 years of coding experience gives you opinions. Kids these days don’t even know how to use the ternary operator properly.
pmezard|2 years ago
You mean not using it at all? 30 years of coding experience gives you opinions.