Golang proposal: container/: generic collection types

athorax 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

On one hand I'm glad to see this being added, but its becoming obvious building generics into the language as-is just isn't a good fit. Hopefully Go v2 can solve this at a more foundational level while still allowing interop or easy porting form current go code.

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troupo an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Go is rediscovering Guy Steele's Growing a Language from first principles, at a much slower pace: https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0?is=qZdfiT3792XyHxSJ

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silverwind 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It's sad that such basic stuff took this long. If we're lucky we might even see a `Map` function in our lifetimes.

	▲	wannabe44 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Map function leads to poor code in Go. Function literals are verbose and inlining is far less agressive. It simply isn't the way of the language. Even python shuns map and filter in favor of comprehensions. A for loop is more readable than the lambda soup.

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pstuart 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Sounds like a win to me. I'd assume that many PL decisions come with with costs of either implementation or readability, and Go's conservative evolution takes that into account. Disclaimer: not a PL designer, just a codemonkey.

It's not a perfect language, and the process has not been without its pain points, but work like this makes the language more powerful and I feel like I get my money's worth when I use it.

Yes, I'm a Go fanboy but I'm not interested in language wars (e.g., yes Rust is more performant and correct but sometimes "good enough" is good enough).

	▲	cyphar 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		On the other hand, design decisions made under one set of constraints can become problematic when you add new features that go against earlier design decisions. For a concrete example, the fact you cannot define custom methods for external types in Go (a pre-1.0 design decision) means that you cannot write proper compile-time generic code to deal with some generic wrapping type (dumb example -- getting a sum of the perimeters of a generic set of shapes in an externally-defined collection type) -- you are forced to work around it with runtime type-switching. There are all sorts of arguments you can make about simplicity but this is an objective shortcoming of Go that is directly caused by generics being added to Go long post 1.0. My take on this is that despite selfishly wanting more from Go for many years myself, adding more stuff to Go at this late stage is just slowly chipping away at Go's uniqueness with features that make a large number of people using them unhappy. (For example, while they make some APIs nicer, iterators turn a basic logic bug that is impossible with for loops -- forgetting to stop iterating when the loop has a "break" -- into a runtime panic. And they really suck to compose.)