Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Featherweight Go

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 169 posts

Re: Featherweight Go

#151

Post by jhoechtl »

bmichel wrote: post #103
jhoechtl wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the intersting discussion. What of the two proposals will receive the Go authors blessing? Isn't the arxiv version just a Guerilla attempt?

The former proposal was made by 2 members of the Go core team. And they are also in the team of the latter proposal. So, no, the first proposal wasn't good enough for the Go authors and the new proposal is in no way a guerilla attempt.

Thanks for clarification. I followed the discussion in https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/187317 loosely, thought that this is the only way to go and wasn't aware of a second investigation stream.

Re: Featherweight Go

#152

Post by jhoechtl »

parhamn wrote: post #6

There’s also a generics implementation on a branch of the go repo. I’m most curious how they perform on compilation speed assuming a big project makes decent use of generics. I doubt golang would merge anything that causes significant slowdown. And I don’t blame them, the only reason I don’t dread TypeScript dev given its slow compile times is you can typecheck async and strip the typing information for the hot reloa…

https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/187317

Re: Featherweight Go

#154

Post by littlestymaar »

psanford wrote: post #135
hombre_fatal wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of generics just means you have to copy and paste everything, like any time you want to reverse a slice. for i := len(a)/2 - 1; i >= 0; i-- { opp := len(a) - 1 - i a[i], a[opp] = a[opp], a[i] } Actively hurts reading code as you have to credentialize in a code base to begin to be able to file entire code blocks into copy and pasted "idioms". Without generics you have to hope the stdlib gets a blessed generic fun…

Weird. While you could copy that from the SliceTricks Go wiki page, you could also just use `sort.Sort(sort.Reverse())` which seems to address all of your complaints.

But it uses an interface, which means dynamic dispatch and an allocation most of the time (because IIRC it tends to break the escape analysis).

That's a recurrent issue with Go: you can either have ergonomic tools (with interface and reflection), or performant code (with no allocation) but you generally can't have both at the same time. Sure it's better than scripting language where you need to use another language when you need performance, but it's still kind of sad.

Re: Featherweight Go

#155

Post by pjmlp »

philosopher1234 wrote: post #149
pjmlp wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As proven by the lack of progress, that invitation has just political value, it allows posts like yours when these discussions take place. For example, while Valhalla has taken several years so far, OpenJDK team has experimental builds that you can go and play around with value types in Java. Where are the experimental builds for generics support in Go?

This actually exists. There’s a go playground earlier in this thread worth generics support

Which apparently hasn't been updated since August, 2019.

https://github.com/ccbrown/wasm-go-playground/tree/master/ex...

So this is the prototype used at the GopherCon talk.

Re: Featherweight Go

#156

Post by adonovan »

jlouis wrote: post #35
lazyjones wrote: post #32

Thanks for reminding me how the rampant abuse of nearly unreadable mathematical notation for things that can be easily expressed in concise natural language contributed to (voluntarily) shortening my academic career. But more seriously, it's interesting how this produces publications before actual implementations.

Closer to logic. There is a straightforward rewrite into prolog if you want a program. Or one of the proof assistants. The notation is abused though. Try looking up some of the work by Guy L. Steele in the recent years.

Just to clarify: Steele has been documenting, not perpetrating, the abuse. See for example

https://labs.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=94065:40150:0::::P40150...

Re: Featherweight Go

#157

Post by m_sahaf »

pcwalton wrote: post #94
baby wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the popularity of Go stems from the lack of generics.

No, it doesn't. Go is popular because of the names and organization behind it, as well as the fact that it's useful for a lot of people despite the lack of generics. Certainly, a lot of people are attracted to Rob Pike's rather idiosyncratic preferences, tastes, and nostalgia for the early days of Unix, which are on display in a lot of Go's design decisions, like the lack of generics. But lots of random people have p…

> Go is popular because of the names and organization behind it

I hear this a lot, but the counterexample is always Dart. Google is behind it, and Lars Bak is definitely not a nobody, yet the language struggled to gain momentum; not until Flutter came on the scene, and it wasn't an official Google project when it started.

Re: Featherweight Go

#158

Post by throwaway34241 »

pjmlp wrote: post #145
throwaway34241 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hard for me to believe that it is as simple as you suggest, considering the large amount of work put in by the Go team already, and the even larger amount of work put in by other programming language implementors to eventually arrive at various (different) design points. Work which often takes many years like C++ concepts. Not to mention the open invitation for concrete proposals on how to add them Go. You might…

As proven by the lack of progress, that invitation has just political value, it allows posts like yours when these discussions take place. For example, while Valhalla has taken several years so far, OpenJDK team has experimental builds that you can go and play around with value types in Java. Where are the experimental builds for generics support in Go?

> For example, while Valhalla has taken several years so far, OpenJDK team has experimental builds that you can go and play around with value types in Java.

Actually Valhalla is pretty interesting to think about. For what I'm currently working on, the inability to have a list of points without individually heap-allocating each one makes a language much more of a non-starter than the lack of user-defined parameterized types does.

Even back when Java was invented, there was plenty of prior art (going back decades) about efficiently representing a list of points in memory. Probably most of its predecessors could do it. Yet Java has lacked this basic ability for 25 years.

I even expect that when they eventually implement it it will work similarly to other popular languages, compared to Go which seems to be drawing on more recent developments (like concepts etc) for its generics design.

Despite this, I don't accuse the Java team of political machinations every time the topic comes up. Mainly because I don't believe that to be the case. Maybe they've prioritized a critical feature for me lower than I would like, but it seems like a substantial amount of work to implement because (like generics) it interacts with other language features in a complex way and (like generics) once they ship a design they will be stuck keeping backwards compatibility with it basically forever, so they only have one chance to get it right.

Re: Featherweight Go

#159

Post by sebe »

m_sahaf wrote: post #157
pcwalton wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesn't. Go is popular because of the names and organization behind it, as well as the fact that it's useful for a lot of people despite the lack of generics. Certainly, a lot of people are attracted to Rob Pike's rather idiosyncratic preferences, tastes, and nostalgia for the early days of Unix, which are on display in a lot of Go's design decisions, like the lack of generics. But lots of random people have p…

> Go is popular because of the names and organization behind it I hear this a lot, but the counterexample is always Dart. Google is behind it, and Lars Bak is definitely not a nobody, yet the language struggled to gain momentum; not until Flutter came on the scene, and it wasn't an official Google project when it started.

Lars gave a talk last year and said the intent was to put dart vm in chrome, then the whole mobile thing happen and there was no room for extra stuff in chrome. https://youtu.be/mPna6D21Eqg?t=480

Re: Featherweight Go

#160

Post by htfy96 »

entha_saava wrote: post #60
parhamn wrote: post #6

There’s also a generics implementation on a branch of the go repo. I’m most curious how they perform on compilation speed assuming a big project makes decent use of generics. I doubt golang would merge anything that causes significant slowdown. And I don’t blame them, the only reason I don’t dread TypeScript dev given its slow compile times is you can typecheck async and strip the typing information for the hot reloa…

I guess it need not be the case that generics will slow down compilation that much. Problem with C++ template generics is that they are reinstantiated per type __per compilation unit__. I think they can * Use dynamic dispatch liberally - such that one instantiation per object size in order to avoid boxing. That said, I don't know how the experimental generics work. And this will obviously prevent some optimizations,…

For caching mechanism, there's zapcc (https://github.com/yrnkrn/zapcc) which launches a background server at first compilation, and reuses instantiated template from the server in the following compilation. Sadly this project was discontinued.
Post reply on HN