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I honestly have mixed feelings about this. It is a really nice showcase of what the standard library can do (walking the AST and modifying it) with little amount of code.

OTOH it would be better to not make this a web-service. As much as it may seem to be convenient, integrating it with "go generate" (when it's ready) would probably be easier to use and not pose any security risks ;)

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Since go generate isn't out yet and the web service can work now, it's a good prototype of what can be done. Obviously once go generate is official anybody could do something like this themselves, even if this particular implementation is never ported.

I agree the web-service is a terrible idea, I just wanted to see if I could implement it. It's also super insecure, as go fetches the package over HTTP (which you can see when you do go get -x gonerics.io/d/graph/string.git)

Actually, I think the web service is the only interesting part of the idea. Generics via string substitution are as old as the hills, I remember doing the same thing for Pascal 20 years ago.

(The factual accuracy of the statement that it was 20 years ago disturbs me. I'm getting old!)

100% agree. it's a break through not because of the problem it's trying to solve, but the approach.

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