A lot of the time you’ll end up with an implementation for each discrete possibility, but that’s pretty crappy especially if you have more than 3 or 4 discrete

A lot of the time you’ll end up with an implementation for each discrete possibility, but that’s pretty crappy especially if you have more than 3 or 4 discrete types you need logic for (though not always bad, some go libs follow this pattern e.g. sort offers a method for each basic type). You could use the empty interface (which is essentially ‘any’), but that generally requires you to do casting or runtime type checking and that’s suboptimal in a statically typed, compiled language. Generally it makes more sense to describe an interface that can be satisfied by different types, and writing logic to handle that interface instead. Go may not have traditional generics but the interface pattern is certainly a kind of generic programming that can be used to achieve some powerful results. Because structs can satisfy many interfaces and interfaces can be satisfied with any kind of struct (if you want an in language example check out the io.Writer interface and the many functions that use it) you can end up with highly reusable code despite not having traditional generics.