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The hoops you have to jump through when you don't have a macro system...

But that’s part of the value proposition of Go: that it’s a small(-ish) language. I like that it lacks magic found in many other languages. Though I concede that the “simplicity” sometimes comes at the expense of developer ergonomics

Yet here we have an example of bad developer ergonomics that so frustrates one developer that they are willing to use whatever bonkers syntax they can get the parser to choke down, and build an AST transformer for Go, to try to get something remotely approximating sane for a single common case.

Which is saying nothing of Go libraries heavily relying on comment-based programming (err, sorry, we call them "struct tags") to generate boilerplate. The language is successful, but "expense of developer ergonomics" is an understatement.

The AST fix is trivial. The key is getting consensus to do it. Without consensus you get a dozen different macros that do more-or-less the same thing.

It seems like a language change would be good; it’s just taking longer than it should.

On the upside there are fewer hoops to jump through when you are reading the code.

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