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This will probably be downvoted, but I personally never felt a huge need for generics. C doesn't have them and is arguably the most successful language in histo

This will probably be downvoted, but I personally never felt a huge need for generics. C doesn't have them and is arguably the most successful language in history. Yes, they are convenient, but they also add a lot of complexity to the language and toolchain. I suspect that this proposal being accepted is largely due to the huge growth of the Go community - I bet the original team (in particular, I'm thinking of Rob Pike) are at best ambivalent about this proposal and were outvoted. Personally, the proposal I was most excited about was to make ints be arbitrary precision by default. As someone who does a lot of math, this would have made Go much easier for me to use. Sadly, this proposal was scrapped a while back.

opnitro 6y ago
C may not have generic types, but much of the standard library does use generics, just through the unsafe mechanism of `void*`. Likewise, go already includes some generic code (the array type), it's just treated specially.
- zwieback 6y ago
  For me the desire to use generics shows up once I've invested some time in making fancy types. When I work in C that point is never reached since problems are solved "the C way". Personally I'm a huge fan of generics but I can understand how the keepers of Go might be reluctant to go down the path of C++, Java and C#.
  - f8o 6y ago
    I think that C# has a successfull implementation because it isn't just about syntax sugar. The runtime knows it. Generics+structs allows many optimizations.
    - zwieback 6y ago
      So true and portable across languages.
- wahern 6y ago
  The equivalent to a void pointer in Go is interface{}. But very little of the C standard library uses void pointers--basically only those interfaces dealing with untyped blocks of memory, such as malloc and free. IME, you see interface{} far more often in Go code than you see void pointers in C code. And C actually has bone fide generics capabilities with _Generic, it's just very simple and manual.
  - wing-_-nuts 6y ago
    go's empty interfaces reminded me too much of the bad old days when everyone passed around Objects to java methods. I hated it.
  - Cyph0n 6y ago
    void * is very useful as an opaque pointer type. For example, it's used all over the place in collection implementations and user-defined arguments (e.g., callbacks, pthread_create). It might not be used much in the stdlib (which is relatively small!), but libraries and applications rely on void * heavily in my experience.
CarelessExpert 6y ago
> C doesn't have them and is arguably the most successful language in history. I'm not sure "C didn't have it" is a good litmus test for determining the value of features... C is called a portable assembler for a reason. > Yes, they are convenient, but they also add a lot of complexity to the language and toolchain. Conversely, proponents of generics would argue that not having them creates complexity for software developers who have to come up with alternative design patterns where generics would be a better fit. > Personally, the proposal I was most excited about was to make ints be arbitrary precision by default. Why would you want that? C doesn't have it... ;)
- gautamcgoel 6y ago
  Haha, touche. Your response is fair. My point was only that some people act like any successful language must have generics, which is demonstrably false IMO. I am not opposed to innovation and ergonomics (hence, my support for arbitrary precision ints), but we should carefully weigh the pros and cons of every new proposal, especially if it increases the complexity of the language and toolchain. In my opinion, the benefits of generics are outweighed by the cost of their complexity.
  - CarelessExpert 6y ago
    First: I ninja-edited my comment after the fact with a thought that occurred to me after I posted, so apologies there. Anyway, yeah, no argument there at all. I'll be honest, as an outsider that's somewhat familiar with Pike's obsession with simplicity in Go, I'm actually a bit surprised this is getting in. It does seem like the kind of high-complexity feature that was deliberately excluded from the language as part of its overall design ethos. But it really comes down to a weighing of pros and cons. Generics have the potential (though definitely not the guarantee!) to trade off developer complexity for compiler and toolchain complexity, and the preference on that choice is a personal one.
    - loopz 6y ago
      Well, then you also know he just didn't see any good implementations of generics, yet. Let's hope this gets good!
moocowtruck 6y ago
"I meant there are no plans for generics. That's not the same as saying we plan not to do generics. It just means we don't have a plan. The FAQ is still accurate. -rob" "The time has come to change Go, given what we have learned over the past decade of using it in production. -rob" the reason this proposal was accepted is because rob and others liked this plan and said over a decade of production taught them it is an important thing to have, in fact rob asked wadler and company to help get things right for go.. so i would say you'd bet wrong
zajio1am 6y ago
> C doesn't have them and is arguably the most successful language in history. And many C programs just emulate them using crazy macros, that are harder to write and are less typesafe than proper generics.
- gwd 6y ago
  I was going to say -- the way you write a lot of "generic" code in C is with macros. Coming to Golang from C and having neither C-style macros nor proper generics was quite painful.
mseepgood 6y ago
> I'm thinking of Rob Pike I do not remember him being against generics. He is the one who contacted his former colleague Phil Wadler to help with the theoretical validation of the type parameters proposal. In his talk about the Go 2 draft specifications (back then the proposal was still based on contracts) he was positive that a good design can be found. (*) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIvL2ONhFBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIvL2ONhFBI
hota_mazi 6y ago
PHP was also hugely successful, success is not the criterion by which this kind of feature should be decided. The bottom line is that generics allows the production of safer, more robust, more evolvable, more documented, more performant, code. Along with static typing, generics are simply a feature that no language created recently should be without.
- baby 6y ago
  and less readable, less auditable, less understandable, etc.
  - hota_mazi 6y ago
    These are all subjective aspects which often confuse unfamiliarity with obfuscation. I can read generic code in multiple languages even when I'm not fluent in these languages. Once you get used to generic code, it actually becomes easier to read and understand than code where everything is type cast or Object typed all over the place.
    - baby 6y ago
      Readability is far from subjective, if 50% of your devs can’t read parts of the codebase then it’s not readable. Simple generic code is fine, but generics can be abused to over engineer things.
- erik_seaberg 6y ago
  A successful language requires less effort to solve your problem. That's why we create them, and it's strange how languages keep becoming popular without nailing this.
baby 6y ago
Agree with you on the generics, they make code harder to read and the biggest selling point of Golang is that it's easy to audit/read/understand. IMO Golang needed sum types and match statements, but it didn't need generics.
Kranar 6y ago
C11 added _Generic as a way to write generic functions, for data structures people use the preprocessor to code-gen instantiations of generic code. Rob Pike has nothing against generics and never expressed criticism of them. His concern was always fairly practical; among the numerous forms of generics that exist among different languages, and the significant variation and rapid evolution of them, how can such a feature be safely added to the language?
s-video 6y ago
>I bet the original team (in particular, I'm thinking of Rob Pike) Apparently he's nervous but can think of useful applications of generics: https://old.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/jditu9/what_do_generics_allow/g9a6a74/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/jditu9/what_do_gene... Robert Griesemer was a coauthor on the Featherweight Go paper so I'm assuming he supports it. I would assume Ken Thompson doesn't care for generics but I think he's retired so he wouldn't vote on it anyway.

opnitro 6y ago

C may not have generic types, but much of the standard library does use generics, just through the unsafe mechanism of `void*`. Likewise, go already includes some generic code (the array type), it's just treated specially.

zwieback 6y ago
For me the desire to use generics shows up once I've invested some time in making fancy types. When I work in C that point is never reached since problems are solved "the C way". Personally I'm a huge fan of generics but I can understand how the keepers of Go might be reluctant to go down the path of C++, Java and C#.
- f8o 6y ago
  I think that C# has a successfull implementation because it isn't just about syntax sugar. The runtime knows it. Generics+structs allows many optimizations.
  - zwieback 6y ago
    So true and portable across languages.
wahern 6y ago
The equivalent to a void pointer in Go is interface{}. But very little of the C standard library uses void pointers--basically only those interfaces dealing with untyped blocks of memory, such as malloc and free. IME, you see interface{} far more often in Go code than you see void pointers in C code. And C actually has bone fide generics capabilities with _Generic, it's just very simple and manual.
- wing-_-nuts 6y ago
  go's empty interfaces reminded me too much of the bad old days when everyone passed around Objects to java methods. I hated it.
- Cyph0n 6y ago
  void * is very useful as an opaque pointer type. For example, it's used all over the place in collection implementations and user-defined arguments (e.g., callbacks, pthread_create). It might not be used much in the stdlib (which is relatively small!), but libraries and applications rely on void * heavily in my experience.

CarelessExpert 6y ago

> C doesn't have them and is arguably the most successful language in history. I'm not sure "C didn't have it" is a good litmus test for determining the value of features... C is called a portable assembler for a reason. > Yes, they are convenient, but they also add a lot of complexity to the language and toolchain. Conversely, proponents of generics would argue that not having them creates complexity for software developers who have to come up with alternative design patterns where generics would be a better fit. > Personally, the proposal I was most excited about was to make ints be arbitrary precision by default. Why would you want that? C doesn't have it... ;)

gautamcgoel 6y ago
Haha, touche. Your response is fair. My point was only that some people act like any successful language must have generics, which is demonstrably false IMO. I am not opposed to innovation and ergonomics (hence, my support for arbitrary precision ints), but we should carefully weigh the pros and cons of every new proposal, especially if it increases the complexity of the language and toolchain. In my opinion, the benefits of generics are outweighed by the cost of their complexity.
- CarelessExpert 6y ago
  First: I ninja-edited my comment after the fact with a thought that occurred to me after I posted, so apologies there. Anyway, yeah, no argument there at all. I'll be honest, as an outsider that's somewhat familiar with Pike's obsession with simplicity in Go, I'm actually a bit surprised this is getting in. It does seem like the kind of high-complexity feature that was deliberately excluded from the language as part of its overall design ethos. But it really comes down to a weighing of pros and cons. Generics have the potential (though definitely not the guarantee!) to trade off developer complexity for compiler and toolchain complexity, and the preference on that choice is a personal one.
  - loopz 6y ago
    Well, then you also know he just didn't see any good implementations of generics, yet. Let's hope this gets good!

moocowtruck 6y ago

"I meant there are no plans for generics. That's not the same as saying we plan not to do generics. It just means we don't have a plan. The FAQ is still accurate. -rob" "The time has come to change Go, given what we have learned over the past decade of using it in production. -rob" the reason this proposal was accepted is because rob and others liked this plan and said over a decade of production taught them it is an important thing to have, in fact rob asked wadler and company to help get things right for go.. so i would say you'd bet wrong

zajio1am 6y ago

> C doesn't have them and is arguably the most successful language in history. And many C programs just emulate them using crazy macros, that are harder to write and are less typesafe than proper generics.

gwd 6y ago
I was going to say -- the way you write a lot of "generic" code in C is with macros. Coming to Golang from C and having neither C-style macros nor proper generics was quite painful.

mseepgood 6y ago

> I'm thinking of Rob Pike I do not remember him being against generics. He is the one who contacted his former colleague Phil Wadler to help with the theoretical validation of the type parameters proposal. In his talk about the Go 2 draft specifications (back then the proposal was still based on contracts) he was positive that a good design can be found. (*) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIvL2ONhFBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIvL2ONhFBI

hota_mazi 6y ago

PHP was also hugely successful, success is not the criterion by which this kind of feature should be decided. The bottom line is that generics allows the production of safer, more robust, more evolvable, more documented, more performant, code. Along with static typing, generics are simply a feature that no language created recently should be without.

baby 6y ago
and less readable, less auditable, less understandable, etc.
- hota_mazi 6y ago
  These are all subjective aspects which often confuse unfamiliarity with obfuscation. I can read generic code in multiple languages even when I'm not fluent in these languages. Once you get used to generic code, it actually becomes easier to read and understand than code where everything is type cast or Object typed all over the place.
  - baby 6y ago
    Readability is far from subjective, if 50% of your devs can’t read parts of the codebase then it’s not readable. Simple generic code is fine, but generics can be abused to over engineer things.
erik_seaberg 6y ago
A successful language requires less effort to solve your problem. That's why we create them, and it's strange how languages keep becoming popular without nailing this.

baby 6y ago

Agree with you on the generics, they make code harder to read and the biggest selling point of Golang is that it's easy to audit/read/understand. IMO Golang needed sum types and match statements, but it didn't need generics.

Kranar 6y ago

C11 added _Generic as a way to write generic functions, for data structures people use the preprocessor to code-gen instantiations of generic code. Rob Pike has nothing against generics and never expressed criticism of them. His concern was always fairly practical; among the numerous forms of generics that exist among different languages, and the significant variation and rapid evolution of them, how can such a feature be safely added to the language?

s-video 6y ago

>I bet the original team (in particular, I'm thinking of Rob Pike) Apparently he's nervous but can think of useful applications of generics: https://old.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/jditu9/what_do_generics_allow/g9a6a74/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/jditu9/what_do_gene... Robert Griesemer was a coauthor on the Featherweight Go paper so I'm assuming he supports it. I would assume Ken Thompson doesn't care for generics but I think he's retired so he wouldn't vote on it anyway.