Avoiding Footguns

Footguns are features or designs more likely to be misused, often leading to self-inflicted problems or bugs (“shooting yourself in the foot”). See a list of C functions banned in the git codebase for being footguns. Some more examples:

• Inconsistent naming

• Manual garbage collection for connections or open files

• Race conditions with async code

• Multiple sources of truth

• Long argument lists

• Shadowing variables in deep scopes

Avoiding footguns comes with experience — often, the footguns are perfectly legal code that can be compiled. Some languages avoid certain footguns (sometimes to introduce other ones). For example, garbage-collected languages remove one class of memory management footguns (at the expense of a GC). 

Language-level footguns are probably the biggest class of footguns — e.g., default arguments are mutable in Python, useEffect without dependencies in React, not closing connections in a defer block in Go or the Drop trait in Rust.

Linters can sometimes catch footgun constructions and surface them as warnings. But the most effective way is just learning them.