5 Gotchas of Defer in Go — Part I

Protect yourself from basic defer gotchas.

Read the follow-up posts here: Part II and Part III.

#1 — Deferred nil func

If a deferred func evaluates to nil, execution panics when the surrounding func ends, not when defer is called.

Example

func() {
  var run func() = nil
  defer run()
  fmt.Println("runs")
}

Output

runs
❗️ panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference

Why?

Here, the func continues until the end, after that the deferred func will run and panic because it’s nil. However, run() can be registered without a problem because it wouldn’t be called until the containing func ends.

This is a simple example, but the same thing can happen in the real world, so if you get across something like this, be suspicious about what could have happened because of this gotcha.

#2 — Defer inside a loop

Do not use defer in a loop unless you’re sure about what you’re doing. It may not work as expected.

However, sometimes it may become handy to use it in loops, for example, for delegating the recursivity of a func to a defer, but this one is out of scope for this article.

Here, defer row.Close() calls inside the loop don’t get executed until the func ends — not when each step of the for loop ends. All calls here will eat up the func’s stack and may cause unforeseen problems.

Solution #1:

Call it directly without deferring.

Solution #2:

Delegate the work to another func and use defer there. Here, the deferred func will run after each time the anonymous func ends.

Bonus Point

👾 The benchmark code is here 👾

For all the examples above

#3 — Defer as a wrapper

Sometimes you need to defer with closures to be more practical, or some other reasons I cannot guess right now. For example, to open a database connection, then run some queries and at the end to ensure that it gets disconnected.

Example

type database struct{}
func (db *database) connect() (disconnect func()) {
  fmt.Println("connect")
  return func() {
    fmt.Println("disconnect")
  }
}

Let’s run it

db := &database{}
defer db.connect()
 
fmt.Println("query db...")

Output

query db...
connect

Why it doesn’t work?

It doesn’t disconnect, and it connects at the end, which is a bug. The only thing that happened here is that connect() gets saved aside until the func ends, and it doesn’t run.

Solution

func() {
  db := &database{}
  close := db.connect()
  defer close()
 
  fmt.Println("query db...")
}

Now, db.connect() returns a func, and we can use it with defer to disconnect from the database when the surrounding func ends.

Output

connect
query db...
disconnect

Bad Practice:

Although it’s a bad practice to do this, I want to show you how you can do it without a variable. So, I hope you can see how deferred and, more generally, how Go works.

func() {
  db := &database{}
  defer db.connect()()
  ..
}

This code is the same as the above solution. Here, the first parenthesis is for connecting to the database (which happens immediately on defer db.connect()) and then the second parenthesis is for deferring to run the disconnector func (the returned closure) when the surrounding func ends.

This happens because db.connect() it creates a value which is a closure, and then defer registers it. The value db.connect() needs to be resolved first to be registered with defer. This is not directly related to deferring however, it may solve some of your gotchas you may have.

#4 — Defer in a block

You may expect that a deferred func will run after a block ends, but it does not. It only executes after the containing func ends. This is also true for all blocks: For, switch, etc., except func blocks, as we saw in the previous gotchas.

Because: defer belongs to a func not to a block.

Example

func main() {
  {
    defer func() {
      fmt.Println("block: defer runs")
    }()
    fmt.Println("block: ends")
  }
  fmt.Println("main: ends")
}

Output

block: ends
main: ends
block: defer runs

Explanation

The deferred func above will only run when the func ends, not when the deferred func’s surrounding block ends (the area inside curly braces containing the defer call). As seen in the example code, you can create separate blocks just using curly braces.

Another Solution

If you want to run defer in a block, you can convert it to a func such as an anonymous func, just like the solutions of gotcha #2.

func main() {
  func() {
    defer func() {
      fmt.Println("func: defer runs")
    }()
    fmt.Println("func: ends")
  }()
  fmt.Println("main: ends")
}

#5 — Deferred method gotchas

You can also use methods with deferring. However, there’s a quirk. Watch.

Without pointers

type Car struct {
  model string
}
func (c Car) PrintModel() {
  fmt.Println(c.model)
}
func main() {
  c := Car{model: "DeLorean DMC-12"}
  defer c.PrintModel()
  c.model = "Chevrolet Impala"
}

Output

DeLorean DMC-12

With Pointers

func (c *Car) PrintModel() {
  fmt.Println(c.model)
}

Output

Chevrolet Impala

What’s going on?

Remember that the passed params to a deferred func are saved aside immediately without waiting for the deferred func to be run.

So, when a method with a value-receiver is used with defer, the receiver will be copied (in this case, Car) at the time of registering, and the changes to it wouldn’t be visible (Car.model). Because the receiver is also an input param and evaluated immediately to “DeLorean DMC-12” when it’s registered with the defer.

On the other hand, when the receiver is a pointer when it’s called with defer, a new pointer is created, but the address it points to would be the same as the “c” pointer above. So, any changes to it would be reflected flawlessly.

Alright, that’s all for now. Thank you for reading so far.

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