Generic methods are a huge win for the language. I've been waiting on these kinds of improvements to the type system before resuming work on my database toolkit.
I just had excellent success migrating a go code base to rust completely AI driven. It led to a healthy performance boost too, as now I don’t need to worry about GC pressure contortions.
It's funny that you and many others have found the introduction of "generics" in Go to be highly valuable, considering one of the motivations for Go's existence was:
Its designers were primarily motivated by their shared dislike of C++[0]
DDJ: In the presentation before the awarding of the Japan
Prize today, you were quoted on the distinction between
reasearch and development. [The former, Thompson stated,
was directionless, whereas development had a specific goal
in mind.] So in that context, is Go experimental?
KT: Yes. When the three of us [Thompson, Rob Pike, and
Robert Griesemer] got started, it was pure research. The
three of us got together and decided that we hated C++.
[laughter] [2]
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)#Hist...
1 - https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...
2 - https://web.archive.org/web/20110521080746/http://drdobbs.co...
Rejecting templates does not mean rejecting generics.
This is provably incorrect.
The position held for many years by the language authors was[0]:
Generics may well be added at some point. We don't feel an
urgency for them, although we understand some programmers
do.
Generics are convenient but they come at a cost in
complexity in the type system and run-time. We haven't yet
found a design that gives value proportionate to the
complexity, although we continue to think about it.
Meanwhile, Go's built-in maps and slices, plus the ability
to use the empty interface to construct containers (with
explicit unboxing) mean in many cases it is possible to
write code that does what generics would enable, if less
smoothly.
The Go 1.18 release added type parameters to the language.
This permits a form of polymorphic or generic programming.
However, the original announcement makes the intent of the project clear: "Not yet", not "never". They were always planned to be accepted into Go. But not before an acceptable solution was found.
They have successfully been able to add major features such as generics without breaking 1.0 compatibility, and the trend is to continue than way. Well there is no major language feature in sight in fact.
Also major figures of the Go team (Russ, Ian, Rob, Ken) are gone.
> However, the original announcement makes the intent of the project clear: "Not yet", not "never". They were always planned to be accepted into Go.
This is an exceedingly charitable interpretation of the position held by at least one Go language designer (Rob Pike)[0]:
Notice that Robert said C was the starting point, not C++.
I'm not certain but I believe he meant C proper, especially
because Ken was there. But it's also true that, in the end,
we didn't really start from C. We built from scratch,
borrowing only minor things like operators and brace
brackets and a few common keywords.
In the end of course it came out quite different from
either C or C++. More different even than many realize. I
made a list of significant simplifications in Go over C and
C++:
...
- no templates
...
By run-time they mean compile-time? There shouldn't be a run-time penalty right?
Also, is there some measure of the additional compilation cost now that generics has been added?
That is a very selective quote which does not reflect the context I provided. So I will extract a selective quote which negates the above:
We haven't yet found a design that gives value
proportionate to the complexity ...I laughed at the thought in the moment and now understand the wisdom shared with me.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)