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Constraints in Go

(bitfieldconsulting.com)
210 points gus_leonel | 1 comments | 17 Nov 24 08:44 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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indulona ◴[17 Nov 24 09:59 UTC] No.42163167[source]▶
i have been writing Go exclusively for 5+ years and to this day i use generics only in a dedicated library that works with arrays(slices in Go world) and provides basic functionality like pop, push, shift, reverse, filter and so on.

Other than that, generics have not really solved an actual problem for me in the real world. Nice to have, but too mush fuss about nothing relevant.

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kgeist ◴[17 Nov 24 10:22 UTC] No.42163244[source]▶
Just checked, in my current project, the only place where I use generics is in a custom cache implementation. From my experience in C#, generics are mostly useful for implementing custom containers. It's nice to have a clean interface which doesn't force users to cast types from any.
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1. neonsunset ◴[17 Nov 24 15:38 UTC] No.42164712[source]▶
C# generics are way more powerful than that when it comes to writing high-performance or just very, err, generic code. Generic constraints and static interface members are immensely useful - you can have a constraint that lets you write ‘T.Parse(text[2..8])’.

They are far closer to Rust in some areas (definitely not in type inference sadly, but F# is a different story) than it seems.

Of course if one declares that they are an expert in a dozen of languages, most of which have poorly expressive type systems, the final product will end up not taking advantage of having proper generics.