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Constraints in Go

(bitfieldconsulting.com)
210 points gus_leonel | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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indulona ◴[] 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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tonyedgecombe ◴[] 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.

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1. brokencode ◴[] No.42169802[source]
Most of the improvements made to any language don’t expand the community much. And they don’t have to, because that’s not the point. The point is to improve the language and ecosystem to help make better software.

Generics support is a ubiquitous feature in static programming languages. If it was included on day one in Go, nobody would have blinked an eye. This is only such a controversial topic in Go because the language maintainers made it one.