If language features were free we'd likely have had generics for a long time now. Unfortunately generics is a trade-off: you get development speed/ease and pay

If language features were free we'd likely have had generics for a long time now. Unfortunately generics is a trade-off: you get development speed/ease and pay for it in compile time, binary size and/or execution speed. This seems to be slowly changing, but Go was designed to be a solution to Google problems - python being slow but some c++ applications taking literal hours to compile. Keeping that perspective in mind makes it easier to understand why Go maintainers have not accepted an implementation of generics into the language yet.