Good call in my book, and I'm extremely excited to have generics finally. I thought they were going to ship with 2.0, but the sooner the better!
It's cool to hate on Go, it's taken over the system programming space for a reason, like it or not, and after working full time on Elixir it's hard not to think in map/reduce and other generic constructs, which were unreasonably verbose before in Go. Now the haters will have to focus on the "if err != nil" statement to pile on the language — though to be fair I'll expect some ergonomic improvement on that aspect as well, eventually.
With generics, Go will be my new Python, but with a decent dependency and deployment story, and I'll just need Zig for my low-level manual memory management needs. What's Rust?
EDIT: indeed being a bit cheeky with HN's favourite language isn't well received in this place.
criticism =/= hate
Nobody "hates" on Go for the sake of it. If some people were not critical of that language, generics would have never been added at first place. I'm glad the Go team acknowledged the flaw instead of the gaslighting that has been going on for years in the go community from a few go users.
Generics were a pain point, but people have been crapping on Go on this forum while people out there are using it to build stuff. It's not a perfect language, but if you read any HN thread about it it's like it's impossible for people to go past the lack of generics or the existence of nil.
I'm curious what you define as systems programming, because Go certainly isn't a systems programming language by the classic definition.
Go has a complicated runtime and GC. It's really not in the same category as C/C++/Rust, but more like Java/C# , just without a JIT.
The only domain where Go is a go-to language is the Kubernetes ecosystem. It's also decently popular for networking heavy applications / microservices / server applications, because the runtime is well suited for those domains.
The C# one seems to be further along though due to having supported the Mono/Xamarin AOT runtime for a long time and is really easy to setup, it’s just a package reference in your .csproj. It also has the benefit of coming with a modern usable language.
Lack of enums and pattern matching is IMO the bigger issue. I miss that regularly.
If the semantics desired are merely those of a simple set, why instantiate storage for the value side of the map? An interface{} consumes 16 bytes. Instantiating a struct{}, i.e. with no fields inside, consumes 0 bytes.
Although I like it being used for systems programming stuff like TinyGo on embedded or F-Secure TamaGo unikernel, that is hardly taking over the domain where C and C++ still rule, and will keep to do so for decades to come, despite the increasing usage of Rust on the domain.
IIRC that was the general feeling then but the impression has changed in the mean time ?
For example, there is a bug in go’s built-in HTML templating, that it misrepresent javascript backticks.
If you do
<script> var string = `http://google.com` </script>
in HTML template, it will interpret // as a comment and return
<script>var string = `http:</script>
This is now really hard to fix; it means either rewriting the JS parser from scratch, but that is a giant change (currently the JS parser is really simple, backticks are hard to do properly without reimplementing all from scratch); the more reasonable choice would be to just ban backticks in HTML templates, but that would break backward compat.
So there is basically an unfixable bug sitting in go html templates.
Given script tags are allowed, this seems like the least reasonable choice. What other arbitrary JS features should be disallowed because the parser isn’t spec compliant?
Only if you want it to change. Our codebase is plain JS/TS, we don't use many recent features, and it's fine.
Looking forward to the day, actually.
OTOH this removes much of the point to use generics, and makes working with stdlib from type-parametric code more painful.
Still great to see things improving. It took mere 11 years.
Take C# for example. The `System.Collections.Generic` namespace is full of generic collections (surprise!) that allow more type safe code. If I have a `List`, I can’t guarantee there isn’t something I don’t want in there (that could cause a runtime exception I don’t catch). But if I have a `List<IFeature>`, I know that everything in the list implements `IFeature` (barring compiler bugs and unsafe code).
Took that much time because of little clique of people outside the go team had way too much influence in the Go community. Let see if they dump the language like they threatened to, as the result of adding generics. Of course they won't.
Generics are there if one wants to, and they aren't like Java, but ADA. ADA got a lot of things right decades ago including the way tasks work from which Go routines should have taken a bit more inspiration .
Congrats to the Go time anyhow.
If you'll recall back in the day there were several different vendoring approaches, but ultimately the go-team proposed and implemented their preferred solution.
Similarly there have been a million generics & error-handling suggestions but none of them were introduced. It's basically lots of distracting discussions, and it doesn't feel so much like a community project that is actually seeking outside discussion and ideas. (No shame in that, but the pretense is disappointing).
Personally I'm waiting for the fuzzing-support to land in 1.18. Fuzz testing is basically magical, and amazing in reporting problems even in code with "high coverage". The generics might be nice, but off-hand I don't see that I'll be needing them in the immediate future in any of my personal projects - but I fuzz-test the hell out of a lot of my projects (which largely revolve around interpreters and compilers).
I'm excited about the prospect of having iterators. It will enable a different, more consistent programming style.
I'm also hoping for immutable collections, even though the lack of specialization will make it more difficult to implement them efficiently. They would enable a more robust way to build concurrent systems.
Most likely yes, or as stated in the ticket, they'll take the existing proposal and implement it in golang.org/x/, where they've had some success fleshing out the design of new packages before incorporating into the standard library. It's worked out well, as early adopters can adopt and generally have a painless transition once included in the standard library.
I agree with iterators and immutable collections -- it's been painful working with trees in go, so hopefully that gets a bit easier now.
Honestly, I'm excited to see what will come of generic functions for channels. Being able to write a generic Dup(in chan T, out ...chan T), or a CtxRecv(context.Context, chan T) (T, error) to cut down on some boilerplate select statement.
they do definitely seem to have some NIH syndrome at times, but I can't say that as time has progressed that I haven't come to appreciate the decisions they've made that seemed controversial at the time.
the Go team has already made the libraries, theyre just publishing them in the /x/ namespace instead of the stdlib.
/x/ has everything that's not under the Go compatibility promise, among other things from the Go project.
I mean designing a feature in a clean room is one think, but using it a the standard library would be a good way to know if they messed up the design in some way.
> I propose we still design, build, test, and use new libraries for slices, maps, channels, and so on, but start by putting them in the golang/x/exp repository.
Though the second comment has merit too, I think it would be good to have some common abstraction right away, like we had io.Writer, io.Reader, etc. so everybody doesn't define their own, as it'll take time to crawl out of that.
Although in practice it did work out well with error wrapping which was first in libraries and then the stdlib defined an interface for them, which resulted in all libraries adopting that.
> Similarly, if constraints isn’t part of 1.18, there will be a lot of independent redefinitions of orderable types. I don’t think we’re going to learn from experience much that could change that package now.
I guess from the standpoint of a language designer it makes life a bit easier not to do anything and just cherry pick the winners of the various generic attempts that the community will create but as an app. developer I find this disturbing. Also I question the rush to a release all of a sudden. Generics took years to come to fruition. Another year for a decent stdlib won't really hurt anyone and for those that really really want it they can enable it through build constraints.
