I don't think this is necessarily true. There are a lot of fuzzy factors that go in to making a language successful and it's tricky at best to get these right, even if openGo was a better language.
As a practical example, go effectively has one person who's full time job is keeping the testing infra happy. It'd take time and money to establish this in a go fork and going without it would make development of the fork much harder.
Isn't that part of the fundamental conundrum though? If your need is so great, and so common, and so beneficial to get solved then the cost of development should be less than the benefits accrued, and smart business would bring that money and time to bear on the challenge and solve it. As Google has done with the main project...
Saying there isn't time enough or money enough to solve the technical challenges sounds like saying those challenges aren't important, or valuable, enough to be prioritized. Which is to say our wallets are in agreement with Googles wallet on the issue of generics in Go.
The considered 'best approach' from the community isn't the best technical approach to the technical issues, it's the best balance of pragmatic solutions for produced benefit (ie ROI), that create a sustainable project/product.
There's one exchange in a blog post linked from the article[1] about dep/modules that I think is illustrative of the entire issue (double >> are quotes in the article from Google/go, single > are commentary from the linked blog author):
>>Although it was a successful experiment, Dep is not the right approach for the next decade of Go development. It has many very serious problems. A few:
>>Dep does not support using multiple major versions of a program in a single build. This alone is a complete showstopper. Go is meant for large-scale work, and in a large-scale program different parts will inevitably need different versions of some isolated dependency.
>Russ [a member of the Go team] has asserted this from day one, and has brought several examples out in evidence, but has simply not convinced the committee that it’s true. Calling it a serious problem, let alone a showstopper, is a significant overstatement. The strongest claim that can be made on this point is that it’s a matter of opinion.
That, to me, is that. Go is Google's language, and Google said that for them, not supporting multiple versions of a dependency was a showstopper. The community read that and saw it as a point for debate, and the author continues to try to debate it in the article.
And that's the issue! It was not a point for debate. Google was being forthright. Google was saying "from day one" it was a literal showstopper, and the community seems to have read it as a figurative showstopper. Who was right in this instance is irrelevant; if the community wants to litigate Google's decisions rather than integrate them into their tools/patches/etc., then the community will not get those things adopted into go.
[1] https://peter.bourgon.org/blog/2018/07/27/a-response-about-d...
For a long time people on the C++ standards committee insisted that we need trigraphs because it had to support systems that didn't even have ASCII. We still don't have pragma once as a standard replacement for include guards because other people seem to compile on some crazy network typologies where it cannot reliably identify files. Taking every "literal showstopper" serious without questioning its merits gets you stuck with C++98 and a lot of quickly accumulating legacy cruft.
This has zilch to do with not being community led, so perhaps the complainers should fish for better arguments. Rust makes the exact same call wrt. this particular issue, and it's very much a community-led language, with a public RFC process.
I am happy that similar kind of situation did not prevail for that long in Go's case.
And the final Java module system is much less flexible than OSGi (which is much more than a module system, which in turn is both a strength and a weakness in this case). Or do Java modules support multiple versions of the same package?
