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Proposal: Go should have generics

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Re: Proposal: Go should have generics

#11

Post by [deleted] »

f2f wrote: post #5
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proposal document itself may have existed for that long, but it's only been public for 14 days. To me, the important portion is the link to the discussion issue [1] created 2 hours ago, which to me seems like a more significant step towards doing the actual work. Before, the default response was "we're thinking about it." Now, it's "let's all talk about it." [1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15292

but the existence of the proposals assumes there were internal discussions, which is counter to the argument that go devs don't care about generics. had anything good come out of that it would've been published in the open. as it stands, the negatives outweigh the positives. hopefully the new discussion will change that, or an entirely new proposal will make everyone see the light.

[deleted]

Re: Proposal: Go should have generics

#12

Post by ktamura »

bigdubs wrote: post #7

After watching Rob Pike's Go Proverbs talk I am pretty convinced generics, as much as some would want it, will never happen. He proselytizes "just copy a little code here and there" quite clearly, which is at odds with the complexity that generics would add.

This. For better and for worse, Go was designed for "simplicity", and generics are anything but simple. I'd be very, very surprised if Go thinks about generics in earnest anytime soon.

I don't say this in anyway to eulogize Go: In some ways, Go is pathetically unexpressive. That said, it currently fills that gap for writing middleware between C sacrificing too much developer productivity and Perl/Python/Ruby/PHP sacrificing too much performance. Generics would be nice to have for this core use case for Go, but it's probably not critical.

Re: Proposal: Go should have generics

#13

Post by slantedview »

bigdubs wrote: post #7

After watching Rob Pike's Go Proverbs talk I am pretty convinced generics, as much as some would want it, will never happen. He proselytizes "just copy a little code here and there" quite clearly, which is at odds with the complexity that generics would add.

It's also at odds with hard-learned lessons of the rest of the software industry, like don't repeat yourself. Golang is doomed to relearn these lessons.

Re: Proposal: Go should have generics

#14

Post by slantedview »

ktamura wrote: post #12
bigdubs wrote: post #7

After watching Rob Pike's Go Proverbs talk I am pretty convinced generics, as much as some would want it, will never happen. He proselytizes "just copy a little code here and there" quite clearly, which is at odds with the complexity that generics would add.

This. For better and for worse, Go was designed for "simplicity", and generics are anything but simple. I'd be very, very surprised if Go thinks about generics in earnest anytime soon. I don't say this in anyway to eulogize Go: In some ways, Go is pathetically unexpressive. That said, it currently fills that gap for writing middleware between C sacrificing too much developer productivity and Perl/Python/Ruby/PHP sacr…

Generics can be (relatively) simple - see C#, they just tend not to be in many implementations.

Re: Proposal: Go should have generics

#15

Post by codehusker »

slantedview wrote: post #13
bigdubs wrote: post #7

After watching Rob Pike's Go Proverbs talk I am pretty convinced generics, as much as some would want it, will never happen. He proselytizes "just copy a little code here and there" quite clearly, which is at odds with the complexity that generics would add.

It's also at odds with hard-learned lessons of the rest of the software industry, like don't repeat yourself. Golang is doomed to relearn these lessons.

We also have the hard-earned lessons of taking DRY to its extreme (left-pad). Where you draw the "copy a little code" line is subjective.

Re: Proposal: Go should have generics

#16

Post by pcwalton »

ktamura wrote: post #12
bigdubs wrote: post #7

After watching Rob Pike's Go Proverbs talk I am pretty convinced generics, as much as some would want it, will never happen. He proselytizes "just copy a little code here and there" quite clearly, which is at odds with the complexity that generics would add.

This. For better and for worse, Go was designed for "simplicity", and generics are anything but simple. I'd be very, very surprised if Go thinks about generics in earnest anytime soon. I don't say this in anyway to eulogize Go: In some ways, Go is pathetically unexpressive. That said, it currently fills that gap for writing middleware between C sacrificing too much developer productivity and Perl/Python/Ruby/PHP sacr…

Generics are a very simple feature as implemented in, for example, SML or OCaml. They're much simpler than Go interfaces, in fact.

Re: Proposal: Go should have generics

#18

Post by duaneb »

xiaopingguo wrote: post #3

Why not just fork the language? Why does one language need to do all the things?

Generics are not "all the things". Last i checked there was still no object inheritance (in a subtype sense for interface implementations), no operator overloading, no bytecode/vm/jit, no inline asm, no macros, no pluggable gc, no call/cc, no (idiomatic) exceptions, no currying, no weak typing or implicit conversions, no way of enforcing referential transparency, no STM, no laziness, no assertions, no contracts, no untagged unions, no algebraic data types, no covariant return types, no pattern matching, no method overloading, no simd, no decorations/annotations.... I am sure i missed a lot.

EDIT: of course this is good; such a language would be beyond nightmarish. By which i mean c++ or scala.

Re: Proposal: Go should have generics

#19

Post by slantedview »

From the post:

> As Russ pointed out, generics are a trade off between programmer time, compilation time, and execution time

This misses the most important metric: quality. Lack of generics forces copying and pasting of code which inevitably lowers quality and increases defects. It's amazing to me that with the all the expense that crappy software causes, we're more focused on compilation and execution time. Last time I checked Golang's performance numbers, the supposed benefits of this focus were not present while the downsides of being a language that forces programmers to do the wrong thing were present as well.

Re: Proposal: Go should have generics

#20

Post by BinaryIdiot »

slantedview wrote: post #13
bigdubs wrote: post #7

After watching Rob Pike's Go Proverbs talk I am pretty convinced generics, as much as some would want it, will never happen. He proselytizes "just copy a little code here and there" quite clearly, which is at odds with the complexity that generics would add.

It's also at odds with hard-learned lessons of the rest of the software industry, like don't repeat yourself. Golang is doomed to relearn these lessons.

> It's also at odds with hard-learned lessons of the rest of the software industry, like don't repeat yourself.

There is nothing wrong with repeating things. It's important to NOT repeat many things but everything? No way. DRY is a great suggestion but shouldn't be looked at as any type of hard rule.

For instance I've been on projects where DRY was taken to such an extreme that even the function decorators (plus their COMMENTS) were abstracted away because a few words or, at least, a single line could be duplicated. This would require looking through multiple files and figuring out the abstraction code just so I would know where the REST endpoints where.

So I'm not the biggest fan of GO but I see zero reason why it's going to be relearning this specific lesson.

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