4 ms·

It doesn't really happen all that often in practice, and when you're hacking on a package that relies on this it's easy enough to have `go generate && go test`

It doesn't really happen all that often in practice, and when you're hacking on a package that relies on this it's easy enough to have `go generate && go test` sitting in your shell history for that iteration cycle.

dilap 12y ago
Well, I think the jury's still out, since there hasn't been a lot of use in the wild yet. I realize it can be quite frustrating to get negative feedback from people who haven't even used a feature yet, so I hope I'm not coming across as overly negative. I am overall a huge fan of Go :) And I do appreciate the minimalistic nature of the approach... I expect we'll start to see people do a lot of generics-type stuff with this -- e.g., add an go:generate annotation to get a customized Foo collection or whatever. It'll be interesting to see how it shakes out.
- blakecaldwell 12y ago
  I imagine most of the complaining is by people that haven't even spent much time in the language, let alone this new tool. I'm would wager that generics were a driving force behind this. They don't want to add them to the language (fair), but are willing to offer a way for us to add them at precompile time.
  - mseepgood 12y ago
    > I'm would wager that generics were a driving force behind this. The driving forces were yacc, protocol buffers, enum strings, unicode tables, encoding/decoding arrays, time zone data. That's what they use it for.
  - lomnakkus 12y ago
    How would that work? AFAIU the idea is that library authors check in the generated code -- so a consumer of your code wouldn't be able to (or at least would be actively discouraged from) generate new code for a library. And thus wouldn't be able to generate "instances" for generic code.
    - blakecaldwell 12y ago
      I haven't spent much time looking into this, and haven't used it yet, but from the Stringer example, they're providing us with a tool to generate strings for enum values. That same approach could be used to generate support for typed collections for your types. I could make the collection-generating code, and you could generate the collections for your types.
      - lomnakkus 12y ago
        Yeah, for your types, but if I'm a provider of a library of generic data structures (which is what the people asking for generics are probably thinking about), you're out of luck since I have no way of letting you generate appropriate instances.

dilap 12y ago

Well, I think the jury's still out, since there hasn't been a lot of use in the wild yet. I realize it can be quite frustrating to get negative feedback from people who haven't even used a feature yet, so I hope I'm not coming across as overly negative. I am overall a huge fan of Go :) And I do appreciate the minimalistic nature of the approach... I expect we'll start to see people do a lot of generics-type stuff with this -- e.g., add an go:generate annotation to get a customized Foo collection or whatever. It'll be interesting to see how it shakes out.

blakecaldwell 12y ago
I imagine most of the complaining is by people that haven't even spent much time in the language, let alone this new tool. I'm would wager that generics were a driving force behind this. They don't want to add them to the language (fair), but are willing to offer a way for us to add them at precompile time.
- mseepgood 12y ago
  > I'm would wager that generics were a driving force behind this. The driving forces were yacc, protocol buffers, enum strings, unicode tables, encoding/decoding arrays, time zone data. That's what they use it for.
- lomnakkus 12y ago
  How would that work? AFAIU the idea is that library authors check in the generated code -- so a consumer of your code wouldn't be able to (or at least would be actively discouraged from) generate new code for a library. And thus wouldn't be able to generate "instances" for generic code.
  - blakecaldwell 12y ago
    I haven't spent much time looking into this, and haven't used it yet, but from the Stringer example, they're providing us with a tool to generate strings for enum values. That same approach could be used to generate support for typed collections for your types. I could make the collection-generating code, and you could generate the collections for your types.
    - lomnakkus 12y ago
      Yeah, for your types, but if I'm a provider of a library of generic data structures (which is what the people asking for generics are probably thinking about), you're out of luck since I have no way of letting you generate appropriate instances.