←back to thread

Constraints in Go

(bitfieldconsulting.com)
210 points gus_leonel | 1 comments | 17 Nov 24 08:44 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
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.

replies(10): >>42163189 #>>42163244 #>>42163415 #>>42163694 #>>42163834 #>>42164296 #>>42164983 #>>42165141 #>>42165270 #>>42165680 #
tonyedgecombe ◴[17 Nov 24 11:01 UTC] No.42163415[source]▶
I sometimes wonder if they should have implemented generics. On the one hand you had a group of people using go as it was and presumably mostly happy with the lack of generics. On the other side you have people (like me) complaining about the lack of generics but who were unlikely to use the language once they were added.

It's very subjective but my gut feeling is they probably didn't expand their community much by adding generics to the language.

replies(5): >>42163502 #>>42163612 #>>42164299 #>>42169690 #>>42169802 #
1. marcus_holmes ◴[18 Nov 24 04:22 UTC] No.42169690[source]▶
Library authors were the main target group, I think.

Without generics, your library has to define interfaces that your users have to implement and it all gets a bit strange and unintuitive.

With generics you can write library code that is easier to use.

The thing I was worried about with this (adding generics) is that we'd start moving more towards the NPM Hell of everyone just writing plumbing code for imported packages. But thankfully that hasn't happened and idiomatic Go still tends to just use the standard lib and very few external packages.