Well, to be honest, my position has consistently been that using Go for scientific programming is not a good idea, and will never be a good idea because the Go team is never going to give you the features you need for it, and that you probably should just use Rust. (Or something else. Rust is not the only choice.) The Go answer is probably that, yes, you need a .Close method, and yes, I agree that in this use case that's really annoying and I would suggest this argues against using Go for this.
People tend to then get annoyed at me for expressing this opinion, but this sort of thing is the reason why. Go is really only merely adequate at interfacing with libraries in other languages [1] which scientific programming does a lot of, and Go has a type system that seems almost precisely tuned to get in your way if you try to program mathematical code in a typed manner but at the same time isn't so weak that you can pull something like a NumPy where at the Python level everything is just untyped so as long as you assemble it correctly up there, the C level can work it all out. Nor can you practically program in that manner, because while you can slather interface{} everywhere, you can't make it convenient to work with like a dynamically-typed language. I think Go is approaching maximally pessimal for scientific-type programming, personally.
I should clarify that when I say Go has "something like" RAII, I do mean pure-Go code only. And by no means is "defer" perfect. (I'm definitely in the camp that it should have been block scoped, not function scoped, and the performance hit can be quite annoying.) It's just that, as I said, it's not like the choice is "either RAII or you're in some manual-management only horrorland"... lots of languages have block-scoped constructs (not just Go) that can be used to 80/20 RAII. That last 20 may be important in some cases, but it's quite often a great deal less important than the 80.
(This post is brought to you by your friendly local "HN poster who has been accused of being unreasonably positive about Go".)
[1] Pretty much every modern language claims to have "great" interfacing with C, despite IMHO wild variances in difficulty. Go is "adequate" because it's not too difficult to simply call a C function, and with not much labor you can get binary-level-compatible structs between the two, which is a nice advantage over Python or Perl or something. But the semantic mismatch is pretty rough around memory management and threading model, and that manifests in slowness in the calls in addition to general semantic mismatch.
Rust is better than Go for sure (cough Generics) but it's already hard enough to fight the mathematics, statistics and machine learning, scientists will not want to fight the Rust syntax as well.
For me, the most promising compiled and statically-typed language for scientific computing is Nim.
Disclaimer: I am the author of a Numpy/Torch/Tensorflow-like library written from scratch in pure Nim, the look and feel is pretty similar to Python Pytorch + Keras for neural networks: https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer
Well, to be honest, my position has consistently been that using Go for scientific programming is not a good idea, and will never be a good idea because the Go team is never going to give you the features you need for it, and that you probably should just use Rust. (Or something else. Rust is not the only choice.) The Go answer is probably that, yes, you need a .Close method, and yes, I agree that in this use case that's really annoying and I would suggest this argues against using Go for this.
That's a good point. Go was my camping ground while Rust was still breaking every month and I didn't want to go back to C++. Although I don't use Go anymore, I have come to appreciate its simplicity and in a lot of scenarios I would definitely recommend it.
People tend to then get annoyed at me for expressing this opinion, but this sort of thing is the reason why. Go is really only merely adequate at interfacing with libraries in other languages [1] which scientific programming does a lot of, and Go has a type system that seems almost precisely tuned to get in your way if you try to program mathematical code in a typed manner but at the same time isn't so weak that you can pull something like a NumPy where at the Python level everything is just untyped so as long as you assemble it correctly up there, the C level can work it all out. Nor can you practically program in that manner, because while you can slather interface{} everywhere, you can't make it convenient to work with like a dynamically-typed language. I think Go is approaching maximally pessimal for scientific-type programming, personally.
I should clarify that when I say Go has "something like" RAII, I do mean pure-Go code only. And by no means is "defer" perfect. (I'm definitely in the camp that it should have been block scoped, not function scoped, and the performance hit can be quite annoying.) It's just that, as I said, it's not like the choice is "either RAII or you're in some manual-management only horrorland"... lots of languages have block-scoped constructs (not just Go) that can be used to 80/20 RAII. That last 20 may be important in some cases, but it's quite often a great deal less important than the 80.
(This post is brought to you by your friendly local "HN poster who has been accused of being unreasonably positive about Go".)
[1] Pretty much every modern language claims to have "great" interfacing with C, despite IMHO wild variances in difficulty. Go is "adequate" because it's not too difficult to simply call a C function, and with not much labor you can get binary-level-compatible structs between the two, which is a nice advantage over Python or Perl or something. But the semantic mismatch is pretty rough around memory management and threading model, and that manifests in slowness in the calls in addition to general semantic mismatch.