I don't really understand this argument. I read the discussion linked to[1], and yeah, monomorphization approaches (whether at compile time, link time, or runtime with JIT) are obviously going to be difficult or impossible, but the reason against using runtime reflection is mostly that it's slow. But that runtime reflection is exactly how you would work around it today.
For the Identity example, could the interface be compiled to be basically equivalent to:
Identity(any) any
and then at the callsite add a cast of the return type to T?
I suppose primative non-pointer types add a bit of a wrinkle but even if it generic methods was restricted to pointer types, that's better than nothing. And the number of those types is relatively small, so when the implementation is compiled it could just instantiate method implementations for all the primative types, if they apply, and then maybe remove them if they aren't needed at link time.
Of course it's also possible there is some detail I've missed.
[1]: https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/refs/heads/master/des...
More specifically, it is that it would introduce surprising performance cliffs – code becoming surprisingly slow due to seemingly unrelated changes.
Though BTQH I think an even more important argument is that you would need to have effectively two generics implementations, one working at runtime and one working at compile time. That's a lot of complexity, with surprising failure modes if these two are not bug-compatible.
> But that runtime reflection is exactly how you would work around it today.
I think the overwhelming majority of people will "work around it" by just not trying to use generic methods.
My understanding is that go already has a hybrid system works at compiletime and sometimes at runtime.
My point is for interface generics it could just always use a single instantiation. Similar to what java does.
Or alternatively, go could go the other direction and add a new type of interface that is only for use in generic constraints, and then generic methods could be part of that interface, but not normal interfaces, so that the generic methods could be called from other generic functions. That would be similar to rust and c++.
Can't speak too deeply for Go specifically, but I do know on .NET one of the big reasons generic methods where T is a structure gets monomorphized per type, is so that stack size is adjusted and potentially even arg passing (i.e. large struct) as far as the caller/callee.
The determination wether type T implements interface I is made at runtime. So is generation of the necessary vtables to produce the interface implementation.
So you can do things like this in package a:
type S struct {
//...
}
func (s \* S) Foo() {
//..
}
type Foo interface {
Foo()
}
func DoSomethingWithAFoo(f Foo) {
}
func Stuff(obj any) {
theFoo, _ := obj.(b.Foo)
theFoo.Foo()
}
var s a.S
c.Stuff(s)
For generic functions, go uses a strategy similar to C++ templates: when you call a generic function the compiler statically produces a concrete specialization of the generic function based on the inferred types for generic parameters.
That is, if you do:
func Bar[T any](x T) {
//...
}
var x int
var y string
var z float64
Bar(x)
Bar(y)
Bar(z)
These two things don't work well together. If I have a variable typed as `any`, and I want to cast that to an interface, I need to dynamically determine 2 things:
1. The shape of the interface's vtable. The go runtime does this by iterating over the runtime metadata for the interface type.
2. For each named method in the interface's vtable, the address of the concrete function to stick in that vtable slot. This is done by accessing the reflection metadata for the implementing type. It verfies the method with name X for type T matches the required signature for the method with name X for interface I, then sticks that method pointer into the appropriate vtable slot.
The problem, however, is what happens when the method with name X is generic. There may, or may not, be an actual concrete method for the set of type parameters. It's possible that statically type T does implement interface I (via generic methods) but that dynamically it doesn't because the particular generic instantiation needed for the particular interface was never made statically.
Prior to go 1.27, this was never an issue, because methods could not declare their own type parameters. They could reference the generic parameters of the receiver, but once the receiver type was known, there was only ever one concrete method X for that receiver.
Once you allow methods to have their own generic type parameters, the compiler can introduced several different concrete implementations for a method X.
This is ok, when you do somethnig like:
var x SomethingWithGenericMethods
x.Foo(1)
x.Foo("hello")
x.Foo(1.2)
But, when you introduce a dynamic cast:
var x SomethingWithGenericMethods
var i SomeInterface
i = x.(any).(SomeInterface)
i.Foo(1)
i.Foo("Hello")
i.Foo(1.2)
So, go 1.27 introduces generic methods, but it gets around this problem by saying:
1. Interface types can't define generic methods
2. Generic methods can't be used to implement interfaces
Thus, it allows adding generic methods without introducing the issues that crop up with dynamic interface implementations.
It is Apple's school of design, think different, ah, actually, there are reasons why the fence is in the middle of nowhere.
Then the design ends up half way there versus being done properly from the beginning.
Yeah very critically.
This is nonsensical. Monads define a strict set of behaviors formalized as "monad laws"[0].
Perhaps what you want is a container which adheres to monad laws capable of abstracting exceptions. Two exemplars of same are Haskell's Data.Either[1] and Scala's Either[2].
0 - https://wiki.haskell.org/Monad_laws
1 - https://hackage-content.haskell.org/package/base-4.22.0.0/do...
2 - https://www.scala-lang.org/api/3.8.3/scala/util/Either.html
That is what I meant. Struggling to picture what the other "nonsensical" thing is.
type Monad[T any] interface {
Bind[U any](func(T) Monad[U])
}
No contributor to Go is responsible for "introducing monads to computer science", as the Monad concept is a member of (or defined by if you prefer) Category Theory[0].
Still, in this case, half the feature is better than none at all, IMO.
[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/items/traits.html#r-item...
The one additional piece of information you need is that in Go, all interfaces are supposed to be trait objects. The exception are union-elements, but that's really a restriction the Go team is trying to remove, not a model to base more features on.
This aspect is what prevents you from statically knowing which interface-implementations you need to generate for a specific concrete type. There could always be new ones added at runtime.
Structural typing is the term typically used to describe "static duck typing".
But who is to say that dynamic evaluation isn't the special case?
Did you?
Dynamically typed/untyped languages finding that strict and visible typing is actually good is another
Debatable how much they have been "right", although this gets them somewhat closer. And I think they have not been "wrong" in the ways they wanted to avoid (they referenced some issues with Java generics as prior art, although I forget the details).
> The post quotes the Go FAQ as saying, "we do not anticipate that Go will ever add generic methods".
> They didn't say they never wanted to do generics, but that they did want to take their time and do them right.
Then when the language is inevitably changed for the better, resolving the complaint, suddenly it was always going to happen and it was just a matter of getting the details right.
Every other language community I can think of is more than willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of their language. “Yeah, this kind of sucks in principle but it’s not something that gets in the way in practice” is a fine perspective. So is “this was a tradeoff; we went in this direction and these are the resulting downsides”. But the golang community practically trips over themselves to constantly argue that obvious shortcomings in the language are actually a good thing and we just don’t get it.
Nobody is saying the language shouldn’t improve. We’ve all been begging the language to improve. But we’re also tired of the constant, obvious, and shameless gaslighting from the community whenever things do get better. You aren’t going to like the comparison, but it’s extremely Trumpian.
He wasn't the only one but he certainly took it to the extreme.
> But we need help from everyone. Remember that none of the decisions in Go are infallible; they’re just our best attempts at the time we made them, not wisdom received on stone tablets.
¹ I would argue that it is really, really hard to add generics to a language after it has already matured, and still "do it right" than to add it in the beginning. At least if you care about backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility adds a lot of constraints to your generics system that will almost certainly lead to a sub-optimal design. And you will be stuck with a standard library, and a lot of existing ecosystem code that would benefit from generics, but don't because generics didn't exist when they were written. This is a lesson I wish go had learned from Java's generics.
I respect that.
My best litmus test these days is support for multidimensional arrays because it's always needed at some point in general purpose languages. CL and Ada had it right from the start while C++ needed C++23/26 to get std::mdspan and we still need to wrap it to pass the underlying/owned memory pool around (https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Multi-dimensional_array for more).
If I want a 1000x1000 array, representing it physically as a single 1000000-element array requires one allocation, and processing it element-by-element (assuming it's stored in the same order we're iterating over it) is sequential in memory and therefore very efficient.
Representing it as 1000 separate 1000-element arrays requires 1000 allocations, and pointer-chasing every time we move from one row to the next.
Otherwise you would have an array of pointers to arrays. The usage (syntax) for them would be the same but the performance would not be.
They also have different uses. You would expect an array of arrays to be an array of arrays which share the same length. For an array of pointers to an array you would expect dynamic length arrays contained within the original array.
Even in c++ could you not just define some int [1000][1000]foo? I've never really used C++ but my C knowledge assumption is that is 1000000 continuous elements.
std::array<std::array<T, N>, M> data;
int data[M][N];
Edit:
For the stack at least. On the heap, you'd need to use a single std::vector<int> and do the indices manually, or use mdspan
It works fine in C though, or FORTRAN, or Ada, or ALGOL 60, ...
NVidia has pivoted to design CUDA hardware with focus on C++ back in , and seems to be doing quite well for them.
CppCon 2017: "Designing (New) C++ Hardware”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86seb-iZCnI
They were also the ones sponsoring the ISO work on mdspan, while HPC research labs are pushing for linalg on top.
I would rather be using Ada today, but that isn't how the world moves.
If it fits on the stack, yes.
Typical code using MD-arrays is scientific code, and the data they manipulate generally do not fit there.
I would very much prefer scheme if the different implementations had a working standard. But I can't take my Chez-scheme code and throw it into Guile-scheme.
But pretty good chance I can take my ECL code and throw it into SBCL or LispWorks.
Bah, I think this debate was already old when I first saw people arguing it on comp.lang.lisp in the 90s. I don't have a dog in this fight other than to reject the notion that Common Lisp is "coherent" and not "organically grown".
The original Scheme belongs in the category of languages like Standard ML and SmallTalk, where a small, careful, and talented group designed them with focus. Common Lisp seems like a bunch of smart people with competing interest and legacy baselines tried to meet in the middle. To the extent CL is more pragmatic, it's another example of "Worse is Better".
When I started building a Lisp-based machine learning framework, Guile seemed like the right choice because it provides GOOPS and generic functions, yet I still ended up with a lot of boilerplate to compensate for the lack of a strong type system.
Scheme feels to me like C is to C++: not ergonomic for large-scale application development. Go is one of those languages that has both minimalism and productivity.
Hopefully next they can add some error handling syntax and controls.
-- Greenspun's tenth rule
He had some lack of conviction to scope it so narrowly.
https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2023/06/22/type-system-updates-...
As an aside - D, Zig, Rust, even typescript got most of the lessons learned from C right
Zig has the (in)famous "Writergate": https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24329
And besides Rust's high count of RFCs, there are things like async (I'm not complaining about it, but its an obvious large-scale "change"), module system changes, etc.
(To be clear, I like both languages a lot. But I wouldn't call them slow moving or right from the start.)
I like CL, but I can't agree that a stdlib that doesn't even have a string split function is batteries-included.
Objective-C in contrast was a very few additions thoughtfully added that composed cleanly and freed the programmer to actually get things done.
The hard part about making a language is creating the stdlib and tooling and support for the language, but actually creating a language itself that has more features and better features than go can be done by a single person in a few months or a year probably, depending on how much experience they have.
Generics specifically are a great example here. A single person can implement a language with go-level generics fairly easily.
A good example of where they're kind of stuck is date formatting - it's stupid, unclear, and likely a mistake, but it's not a fundamental flaw; it's just a quirk.
The trouble is that Rust is older than Go and it was already confusing people into thinking enums and sum types are the same thing, so by using slightly different syntax, iota, Go avoided the whole confusion of users thinking that enums would behave like sum types instead of actual enums.
Is your attempt at making a point that not having sum types is the massive flaw? Sum types are a useful construct, to be sure, but there are plenty of good languages without them. That's more on the design quirk end, realistically.
iota is a massive kneecap _because_ it's semantically identical to enum in C and Typescript.
> Is your argument actually that not having sum types is the massive flaw? Sum types are a useful construct, to be sure, but there are plenty of good languages without them. That's more on the design quirk end, realistically.
In a dream world sure we'd have full blown sum types (and that would give a result type which would also solve a lot of the nil-interface-combined-with-error-handling issues that I've ran into when working with go), but I can forgive that. The problem is this - https://www.zarl.dev/posts/enums
The only case I see made in there is that it doesn't like how Go implicitly converts consts. While that may be a reasonable criticism, it doesn't have anything to do with iota. It is related to the type system and applies in general. Consider the same problem exhibited here:
type Email string
func Send(email Email)
func() { Send("invalid") } // Converted string const does not satisfy Email type expectations
It was made abundantly clear when Go was released that it was intended to "feel like a dynamically-typed language". Being able to pass arbitrary values is perfectly in line with a dynamically-typed language. Realistically, the type system in Go is there to give the compiler optimization hints, not to offer type safety. Go was targeted at those wanting to use Python, without the programs being painfully slow to run. How much of a kneecap is implicit type conversion, really, when it is already in line with what the target audience is accustomed to? It is a quirk at best.
If I google this quote a comment from you comes up here on this exact topic, where you seem to have completely missed the point there too. If I link to the docs [0], the full quote is "It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language. " So it is a statically typed language first and foremost. If you want to rehash the discussion and tell people that a flawed type system that people have been asking for a solution to for close to a decade [1] you can just re-read the last time the arugments were made as I don't think I'm going to make any headway there.
[0] https://go.dev/doc/ [1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19814
Right, because that is primarily how it makes things fast. Python is slow largely because it spends an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what things are. Go knows what things are at compile time because the static type system tells it what things are and thus doesn't have to waste runtime compute on figuring out what things are, aside from when you use the reflect package, like Python does. That was its value-add — that it is kind of like Python, but faster. We already went over this...
> If I link to the docs [0]
I said original announcement, so I'm not sure why you wouldn't look there? Trying to be obtuse on purpose? Regardless, performance was indeed considered more important than being dynamically-typed. After all, if performance wasn't a concern then you'd just use Python. Go exists only because it was solving a problem that wasn't already solved. Slow Python was already solved. Type safety was already solved. It didn't need to go into those territories.
So is nil. Care to make the same argument?
There is a stronger case to be made for the other two. Calling GOPATH a design mistake is a stretch as it was perfectly suited to use within Google, but it didn't fit the typical solo developer's environment. Lack of generics made writing certain types of code difficult. You could be convincing in suggesting that Go did end up being used less than it otherwise would have because of those choices.
iota? It's just a construct that generates numbers (an enum). How does that kneecap anything? If it really bothers you, you can manually number the values by hand instead. Why would anyone reject a language because it allows you to optionally choose to have the compiler assign numbers automatically instead of forcing you to do it manually? The answer is nobody. In fact, most popular languages have something equivalent to iota.
Thus “go borrowed it from C, therefore it can’t have been a mistake” is a pretty lame take. The whole point of a new language is to make improvements on what’s out there already. Go missed an opportunity to fix one of C’s most notorious mistakes. So yes, they kneecapped themselves by forcing all of the users of Go to continue dealing with this well-known footgun.
Does it mean Go isn’t popular? Of course not. C was popular. PHP was popular. JavaScript is popular. Go is popular. This is always in spite of their faults. But Go could have been better.
The problem is the implicitness of it and how easy it is to produce them and forget to check for them.
You're almost there, but it is wildly considered to be massive mistake in context of arrays. C has weird array semantics that are confusing and hard to get right, even for seasoned developers. That is where NULL comes to bite people time and time again. Go did not inherit C's arrays. Neither did Javascript. They go out of their way to avoid what C did. In Go, you can come close to the same semantics if you use the unsafe package, but take note the name.
Yes, they still have nil, but the scope is tightly constrained and while it is technically possible to misuse, you have to try pretty hard to do so. There are many other things that are more likely to end up being misused. Those would be the more massive mistakes.
> But Go could have been better.
Obviously. Every language ever created can be better.
From Tony Hoare: "I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object-oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years."
Odd that he wouldn't mention the word "array" anywhere in that quote.
> Yes, they still have nil, but the scope is tightly constrained and while it is technically possible to misuse, you have to try pretty hard to do so.
Like by not remembering to check if a pointer is nil? Or actually comparing one typed nil to a different typed nil?
> Obviously. Every language ever created can be better.
Only one of us is arguing that reimplementing C’s mistakes is actually a good thing.
Rule of thumb is to not introduce values that aren't valid. Equally, don't put in -1 for an age value, even if the language allows you to. You might later forget to validate that the age value is valid.
Yes, mistakes are possible, but these types of mistakes are pretty rare. There is some value in eliminating the possibility of those mistakes, sure, but we cannot pretend that it comes cost-free. There is good reason why almost nobody uses Rocq.
> Or actually comparing one typed nil to a different typed nil?
This is something that is likely to confuse, but not a facet of nil. It is related to interfaces. Let's not flail around like one of those wacky blow up things at the used auto lot.
> Rust is older than Go and it was already confusing people into thinking enums and sum types are the same thing
Of course the social landscape depends on people actually using it. None of the people who weren’t using Rust at the time were magically confused about enums and sum types by the mere existence of some new and experimental language.
Rust barely existed at the time Go was first being developed. And given the history of Go and the notoriety of its core team for flatly ignoring prior work in programming languages, it’s extremely unlikely that Pike et al gave more than a cursory glance to what nascent Rust was doing at the time.
But even if they had, to suggest that they intentionally replicated a dumb thing from C but gave it a different name to avoid users being confused by a different thing from a language that roughly nobody knew about at the time is bananas.
That's nonsense. Brainfuck has shaped the social landscape despite effectively nobody using it, and absolutely nobody using it for any real work. The social landscape is not at all dependent on use.
> And given the history of Go and the notoriety of its core team for flatly ignoring prior work in programming languages
Huh? Go comes straight out of prior work. It is nearly indistinguishable from Alef. What the Go language flatly ignored was being innovative. Reasonably so, of course. It wasn't trying to innovate in programming languages so that we'd have another to throw on the heap of languages nobody uses. It was trying to solve a specific business problem using well-established methods.
If it came out of anywhere else, it might have struggled even to hit the homepage here.
0: https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang#project-statu...
Carbon is by its own admittance not ready to use and I think mostly relegated to solving Google’s problems with C++ right now.
Both of them didn’t ship with a standard library as robust as Go’s.
One thing that made Go popular out of the gate is it is extremely good fast to build out robust HTTP services and infrastructure.
This is a very common use case and they tailored Go to be a great fit for it. You can build your entire backend without a single third party module if desired using Go’s standard library and it isn’t terribly complicated to do so.
Of course adding generics is not something that every language needs to do. Scripting languages like Ruby don't really need this style of generics. It doesn't fit the design of the language, and it's not even clear what that would look like in Ruby.
But static typing with generics does solve a recurring problem, and we've seen some real convergence towards type hints and type systems even in staunchly dynamic scripting languages. Modern Javascript is now mostly Typescript, and they've successfully retrofitted a very advanced type system in the last place I would have expected 20 years ago.
They added enums, they added sealed classes. They're trying to get rid of null (apparently it's really hard). The problem is that in 2012, when go 1.0 was released, this should have been obvious to everyone.
Here's a famous discussion from 2009, three years before the 1.0 release (tldr: facepalm)
Sum types I didn’t really miss, because you can implement a type-safe equivalent using the Visitor pattern, and retain an interface-implementation separation that native sum types typically don’t provide.
Every compiled JAR out there has to keep working as always on a JVM with updated semantics, and worse code has to be compatible, when passing class instances around between old and new code.
Then there are the guest languages on the JVM as well.
Remember that the generics implementations in other languages (like Java) take up half the spec + implementation - that's not something that Go wanted.
> The post quotes the Go FAQ as saying, "we do not anticipate that Go will ever add generic methods".
You asked the question
> Where did "they" say "we" didn't need generics?
And I (re)posted a quote from them, which sounds to me like, at the time, they believed that "we" Go users didn't need generics.
They may have changed their mind, which is totally fine! But I do think it sounds like the person you were replying to wasn't commenting in bad faith or misunderstanding or fighting a straw man as you posted. Seems like a reasonable interpretation of what the Go devs had said at one point. To each his own though!
We already had generics when they wrote "we don't anticipate adding generic methods."
> Go intentionally has a weak type system... Go in general encourages programming by writing code rather than programming by writing types...
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/29649#issuecomment-45482...
https://www.adacore.com/case-studies/nvidia-adoption-of-spar...
The impression I have always gotten from Go's designers is that they are rather arrogant and averse to the idea of using other people's work. They want to develop everything from first principles, but by so doing end up with poor reinventions of well-studied concepts.
They did use someone else's work, though. If you recall, Philip Wadler (of Haskell fame) designed Go's generics.
> but by so doing end up with poor reinventions of well-studied concepts.
Which is funny as there is probably nobody on earth that would be more capable than Wadler to get the job done. His pedigree in that area of work is pretty astounding. If he couldn't do more than create a poor reinvention, what hope did the laymen working on the Go core team have?
Answer: They had no hope. It's not like they weren't trying. Ian Lance Taylor, for instance, is well known for beginning work on generics in Go before it was even first released to the public. He, among others, quite simply, were unable to figure it out.
Everything looks easy and straightforward when observed comfortably from an armchair, I suppose.
Stop excusing them, they were the first to acknolowdge being wrong in first place,
"They are likely the two most difficult parts of any design for parametric polymorphism. In retrospect, we were biased too much by experience with C++ without concepts and Java generics. We would have been well-served to spend more time with CLU and C++ concepts earlier."
-- https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draf...
What is there to excuse? Your quote confirms that they simply don't know what they're doing as was already established. Not that anyone should expect them to. They're just regular average humans, same as every other random Joe you encounter while walking down the street, who all equally have their own failings and shortcomings. Why HN is constantly trying to put these particular people on a pedestal, I'll never know. Jealously that regular bumbling idiots just like them accidentally stumbled into creating something popular (for some definition of popular), perhaps?
And it's not like Golang is some freshman student's hobby project; it was created by one of the world's largest tech companies, by people with a strong pedigree in programming language design.
As for the detractors, from the first generics proposal this was called out as a "not now", not never. There were questions of implementation. They aren't a super large team, and they try to do things incrementally and do them well.
What? The post quotes the Go FAQ as saying, "we do not anticipate that Go will ever add generic methods". There is also some similar discussion of the original generics proposal, with language like "then it's much less clear why we need methods at all". (I'm omitting some context, but I don't feel that it changes the meaning.) Those feel much closer to "never" than "not now".)
The post is also subtitled "A change of view".
Everyone also wanted and accepted the need for generics. It was always something they wanted to add to the language. Rob Pike never said that that kind of abstraction isn’t what golang is for. It was always just a matter of getting the design right.
Go has always been a systems language. It was one when we thought it was going to fit nicely for low-level, high performance use-cases. Given that the GC, runtime overhead, lack of control over memory layout, and other issues made it a poor fit for what we historically thought were systems language tasks, it’s still a systems language because we’ve grown to understand that the term “systems program” has always meant network middleware that shuttles around JSON and transforms it.
Dependency management too. Modules were something that nobody argued were unnecessary. None of the language developers ever claimed that “you should always build against HEAD, and if upstream breaks you, that’s a coordination problem to be solved socially”. The community didn’t need to independently invent godep, then glide, then govendor, then dep, before the core team finally shipped modules. That was just enthusiastic parallel exploration of a problem space that everyone agreed was a problem.
GOPATH was always understood to be an awkward temporary scaffold that everyone tolerated while the real solution was being designed. The single-workspace model was never defended as philosophically correct or a deliberate feature of the language. When modules arrived, everyone was simply relieved that this obvious stopgap was finally replaced.
The core team always intended to add builtins for min/max. Nobody ever told you to just write `if a > b { return a }; return b` yourself because it was “only two lines.” The fact that every Go codebase in existence had its own copy of this logic, typically buried in a file called util.go, was not evidence of anything being missing from the language.
Range was always a stopgap before iterators could be implemented. Nobody ever argued that iterators were needlessly complicated and went against the spirit of the language. The slices and maps packages provided important missing features that everyone using the language wanted.
Everyone agrees that errors were anemic from the outset. errors.Is/errors.As are nice additions but everything was Just Fine™ before they were added.
Speaking of errors, having two lines of error-handling boilerplate for every line of code is good, and right, and perfect. It’s not verbose; it’s “explicit”. But when that gets changed to be less verbose, we will all agree that it was always a pain and made reading code unnecessarily more difficult and that everyone always expected this to be fixed some day.
I personally can’t wait to see what next development will never have been “against the Go philosophy” and definitely not something that gophers argued was perfect the way it was any time misguided malcontents and rabble-rousers wrongly tried to suggest the language wasn’t perfect the way it was.
If I were uncharitable I might call the categories "people who are somewhat removed from reality" and "people who inhabit observable reality". Avoid the former, treasure the latter.
Languages evolve for a reason and nobody should give a shit about people who do not understand why.
The writing is on the wall for next development.
“For the foreseeable future, the Go team will stop pursuing syntactic language changes for error handling. We will also close all open and incoming proposals that concern themselves primarily with the syntax of error handling, without further investigation.”
And of course, it was replaced with a more correct implementation that was incompatible with that awful stopgap because semantic correctness trumps all. vendor/ trees and GOPATH were never meant to be remotely compatible, and don't you know -- the Go compatibility guarantee(TM) doesn't apply to misuse of GOPATH to work around shortcomings^Wwell-considered designs of Go, even if it breaks the largest Go project at the time!
(/s It still shocks me that they decided to drop "src" from vendor/src and break compatibility when they finally got around to supporting vendoring despite every tool using it. And symlinks don't work because Plan 9 is the future!!)
Who are we that has always defined that term that way. For any systems programmer golang has pretty much not been a solution.
Systems is below layer 4 of the network stack, it is building the network stack in the first place.
I really hope it is more ergonomic error handling. Or maybe sum types/discriminated unions.
They've publicly said no more language changes specifically for better error handling are coming, it will at most be the library-level improvements.
> Or, we could decide that parameterized methods do not, in fact, implement
interfaces, but then it's much less clear why we need methods at all. If
we disregard interfaces, any parameterized method can be implemented as a
parameterized function.
> So while parameterized methods seem clearly useful at first glance, we
would have to decide what they mean and how to implement that.
Let's get this straight. I'll give you a long quote from Rob Pike's article where he describes the history of the go language:
""" One thing that is conspicuously absent is of course a type hierarchy. Allow me to be rude about that for a minute.
Early in the rollout of Go I was told by someone that he could not imagine working in a language without generic types. As I have reported elsewhere, I found that an odd remark.
To be fair he was probably saying in his own way that he really liked what the STL does for him in C++. For the purpose of argument, though, let's take his claim at face value.
What it says is that he finds writing containers like lists of ints and maps of strings an unbearable burden. I find that an odd claim. I spend very little of my programming time struggling with those issues, even in languages without generic types.
But more important, what it says is that types are the way to lift that burden. Types. Not polymorphic functions or language primitives or helpers of other kinds, but types.
That's the detail that sticks with me.
Programmers who come to Go from C++ and Java miss the idea of programming with types, particularly inheritance and subclassing and all that. Perhaps I'm a philistine about types but I've never found that model particularly expressive.
My late friend Alain Fournier once told me that he considered the lowest form of academic work to be taxonomy. And you know what? Type hierarchies are just taxonomy. You need to decide what piece goes in what box, every type's parent, whether A inherits from B or B from A. Is a sortable array an array that sorts or a sorter represented by an array? If you believe that types address all design issues you must make that decision.
I believe that's a preposterous way to think about programming. What matters isn't the ancestor relations between things but what they can do for you.
That, of course, is where interfaces come into Go. But they're part of a bigger picture, the true Go philosophy. """
Rob Pike, 2012
I can draw a few conclusions from this: firstly, he didn't want to add generics at all because he didn't think they were useful, and secondly, he doesn't understand programming very well and doesn't know what generics are and confuses them with inheritance.
The ease of grokking Go (both reading and writing) are big advantages, and facilitated by the "small" feature set of Go.
The slow turtle wins the race against the overly eager rabbit... so I'm okay with that
I moved to Rust professionally 4 years ago and haven't looked back. Mutex<T> Option<T> Result<T, Err> are all phenomenal.
I've written everything from web backends, frontends (hurry up wasm, seriously), to Node.js and Python extensions.
Web backends use under 1mb of memory and can support hundreds of thousands of concurrent users on a $2/m VPS. Frontends can be beautifully multithreaded. Native extensions can dance between OS threads and multi-threaded runtimes.
When I review code I focus only on the logic, not sidetracked by reasoning about race conditions or anything. Great when you review the work of less experienced contributors.
The ultra strict compiler is extremely helpful with LLMs. You bounce back and forth until it compiles and, if it compiles, it's usually correct.
It's at the point where I can't really see a use case for another language - and yet, no one uses it! It's madness!
Maybe you mean to refer to concurrency?
Like what?
But that's the thing, it's just IMO.
nah I'm kidding
<after 55 seconds>
Seriously, what's wrong with `#define`?
It'll be interesting to see the next language that comes along rejecting bloat in favor of simplicity, and then we can all start again.