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0 pointsquatrevingts13y ago0 comments

I am highly skeptical that they are actively investigating ways to support generics, or that they are willing to change anything else about the language to support them better.

This statement, part of the standard Go talking points, seems to be designed to persuade the unsure to give the language a chance, "and generics will be around later once we figure it out." Not likely.

I think the designers know that no perfect shining implementation of generics--compatible with all of Go's existing design decisions--is going to arise deus ex machina after eluding researchers for all these years.

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ominous_prime13y ago· 2 in thread

I would like to believe that the go team members aren't being disingenuous when they say this.

There has been some talk, but it's mixed in with a lot of noise too.

I don't think that anyone is expecting a PL research breakthrough to provide some generics panacea. I think this is more along the lines of how can we pragmatically introduce generics without messing up too bad. From what I've seen, I personally think some form of templating has the most promise (though I am far from qualified to actually comment on its viability).

papsosouid13y ago

>I don't think that anyone is expecting a PL research breakthrough to provide some generics panacea

That already happened. In 1976. There is simply no excuse for this disingenuous "oh but go is magic and special and can't do it the same way everyone else can" nonsense. If people want that argument to be taken seriously, then they need to start offering actual specific problems with parametric polymorphism as it would apply to go. Not just saying "we're special".

ominous_prime13y ago

No one is saying generics can't be implemented in go, or that go is "special".

Implementing generics requires tradeoffs of some sort -- compile-time and size, runtime efficiency, or language-complexity. The creators didn't want to accept any of these compromises, at least for the initial release of go.

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