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Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

go generate is in 1.4 which will arrive shortly

The proposal (the implementation is pretty much this) is here: https://docs.google.com/a/golang.org/document/d/1V03LUfjSADD...

If you feel a real strong need for generics, for something like a "sort by property of my custom type... do it for n types", then it's now trivial to generate that.

You can code like you have the features the core doesn't support, whilst having the succinctness, performance and maintainability that the language delivers.

I've coded Go almost daily for 2+ years and only a couple of times had the urge/need for generics... I dunno, maybe I'm the exception here.

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I've had the same experience - very little need for generics in Go on a regular basis. I really appreciated the following snippet from http://robnapier.net/go-is-a-shop-built-jig:

"Probably the biggest complaint people have with Go is the lack of generics. And I did run into that in just the first couple of weeks of work on my project, and I wound up with a bunch of duplicated code to work around it. And then, when it was all working, I refactored out the duplicated code. And I refactored again. And in the end, the whole thing was simpler and shorter than what I would have done with generics. So again, in the end, Go turned out to be a language for solving real problems rather than a language filled with beautiful tools, and so you build real solutions rather than finding excuses to use your beautiful tools. Don’t try to make Go what it isn’t. If you’re trying to solve abstract CS problems in their most generalized forms, then you may find it frustrating. But if you’re trying to solve specific, practical problems in the forms professional developers typically encounter, Go is quite nice."

So ..... he ended up doing far more work than he would have done had Go been like any other modern language? Without detail about what these refactorings were and why he didn't write the code that way at first, what lessons he drew from it etc this anecdote is not very useful.

> eg bindata: translating binary files such as JPEGs into byte arrays in Go source

I'm doing that myself in a terribly hacky way using custom shell scripts and a bit of python to print out a .go file -- but seeing it in this list makes me wonder if it is a common problem that has been solved better already - does anyone know of any tools for this? (I imagine something like "bin2src -i foo.jpg -o foo.go", with support for a variety of languages)

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