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Comment by f2f | Hacker News Reader

"The intent is not to add generics to Go at this time, but rather to show people what a complete proposal would look like. We hope this will be of help to anyone proposing similar language changes in the future."

This started in 2010. Hopefully an illustration that go's developers are not against generics in general, this ought to quell some of the negativity... Pick one of the four proposals you like :)

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The proposal document itself may have existed for that long, but it's only been public for 14 days. To me, the important portion is the link to the discussion issue [1] created 2 hours ago, which to me seems like a more significant step towards doing the actual work.

Before, the default response was "we're thinking about it." Now, it's "let's all talk about it."

[1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15292

but the existence of the proposals assumes there were internal discussions, which is counter to the argument that go devs don't care about generics. had anything good come out of that it would've been published in the open. as it stands, the negatives outweigh the positives. hopefully the new discussion will change that, or an entirely new proposal will make everyone see the light.

This was actually mentioned during the Golang team's AMA on reddit. They have wanted to make the proposals for generics public for a while, it probably just took some effort to organize it all and make sure it was OK to publish.

https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/46bd5h/ama_we_are_t...

> Some people on the Go team have sunk considerable time in producing generics proposals, but they've all had serious drawbacks. I'm hoping those proposals will be published at some point so people can see the depth of complexity that generics bring; it's almost always underestimated.

It's not so much "let's all talk about it", but "here's how detailed a proposal needs to be to make it worth considering".

Sorry, I mean the opening of a Github issue regarding generic programming by the Go team itself is the beginning of a new stance.

It isn't a new stance either. For years people have been posting their ideas for Go generics to golang-nuts, and the questions inevitably lead to asking how they'd implement it, how it would interact with interfaces, and so on. Most of the time the proposer hadn't thought it all the way through in those regards. The point of publishing these proposals is to help speed up that process: now the first response can be to point at these and ask for a similar level of thoroughness.

>This started in 2010. Hopefully an illustration that go's developers are not against generics in general, this ought to quell some of the negativity...

Wouldn't the fact that this started 6 years ago and gone nowhere re-enforce the negativity?

They better implement something very near by, Swift is coming for them.

Yea Swift is honestly great to write

Doesn't Swift's tooling leave much to be desired?

I haven't really looked at Swift properly but from what I see on the iOS dev blogs I follow, it's a lot more complex than Go and I can't see how productivity / etc. would be improved sufficiently to make the learning and general brain investment worthwhile for me.

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