well, here it comes...
introducing generics was a mistake. give it a couple of years and golang would be indistinguishable from java
introducing generics was a mistake. give it a couple of years and golang would be indistinguishable from java
Java only got something approaching sum types in Java 17 with sealed classes, which came out in 2021.
Standard ML has had this feature since the 1980s!
You might want to consider that there are type system linages that exist that are quite different to the one presented by Java.
You could do this before without generics, you'd just be unsafely casting types (which can panic at runtime) or assigning to a closured variable, which is quite indirect.
generics however are more available to an average gopher
i believe that such availability will eventually produce a go version of spring, or a typescript-like type system, or something even worse
I find TS to be pretty great, especially in how you can use the type-system to help you build your code. If your goal is not that, then we'll be aiming for different things.
> is heavily discouraged both by best practices and by the api
On this though, I'm unaware of generics being discouraged? Given they haven't even been released yet, and the amount of effort that's been put into building them, I don't think there's any reason to believe they're discouraged.
Even though this opinion has changed, I don’t think it’s been completely reversed, just weakened. So I still think “Idiomatic Go” would be to avoid generics, except in some specific situations. To me, Generics feel like “smart code” in any situation except the most basic and the predominant mindset I’ve come across is that Go code should be dumb and easily understandable (if verbose).
I think the situation with TS is different. I also like TS (but haven’t used it as much), but tend to write different code with it than I would with Go. I don’t think there is any one clear winner and I find it more helpful to write code as expected for the language chosen, rather than trying to apply the ideas I loved from every language to every other one (as a user, obviously language implementors should be open to inspiration). Otherwise I would probably spend a significant amount of time poorly reinventing Rust Results in every language I use, which would temporarily confuse everyone else who read my code and not be as robust.
If only. Sadly generics in Go are nowhere near that advanced and have no possibility of providing even the protections that TypeScript can.