Constraints in Go

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.

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.

Having recently had to work on a Go project for the first time, I think I agree with you here. I'd tried Go a little bit when it came out, had zero interest in what it offered, and then when I was asked to work on this project a couple months ago I thought it would be fun to try it out again since I had read the language had improved.

No, it still feels like programming with a blindfold on and one hand tied behind my back. I truly don't get it. I've worked with a lot of languages and paradigms, am not a zealot by any means. Other than fast compiles and easy binary distribution, I don't see any value here, and I see even experienced Go programmers constantly wasting time writing unreadable boilerplate to work around the bad language design. I know I must be missing something because some people much smarter than me like this language, but... what is it?

> Other than fast compiles and easy binary distribution, I don't see any value here, and I see even experienced Go programmers constantly wasting time writing unreadable boilerplate to work around the bad language design. I know I must be missing something because some people much smarter than me like this language, but... what is it?

If you "other than" two huge-for-many-use-cases good things, sure, it might look bad. ;)

But I would add good overall performance and in particular straightforward flexible concurrency support to the list of good things.

And IMO once you're in the set of "things with good perf" there's generally a lot of "boilerplate" of one sort or another anyway.

It might be nit picking, but that's more the ecosystem or tooling that's great. The language is mediocre, but it's what everyone gushes about.

I still remember people gaslighting everyone that any feature Go had was ESSENTIAL, and every feature Go didn't have was USELESS or too complicated for mere mortals "delivering value".

And the fast compiles at least are in big parts because the language is so horrendously basic. Can't get hung up on checking type constraints if you barely have any.