Java's top priority is to never, ever break anything. It has to be both binary and source compatible. That's a major reason why generics in Java are so broken.

Java's top priority is to never, ever break anything. It has to be both binary and source compatible. That's a major reason why generics in Java are so broken. They couldn't change syntax to make it nicer and they couldn't substantially change jvm to make it generic-friendly. Which leads us to type erasure and weak integration of generics into the language. Go has quite a different opinion on this question -- we'd rather break things but make a tool (gofix) to automatically fix all your source code. Also Go doesn't aim at binary compatibility at the moment as compilation time is _extremely_ fast and there are no shared library support yet. Most likely they'll be more conservative with Go becoming stable and getting 1.0 release but that doesn't prevent them to break things for 2.0 if that's needed.