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Comment by zak_mc_kracken | Hacker News Reader

> Our conservatism should be a testament to how much we care about quality.

Offering code generation as a solution to code reuse is not caring about quality, it's laziness.

Fixing the lack of generics is not the intent of supporting a standard way to do code generation. The intent is to allow for things like generating code from protobuf specs and yacc. In fact, there was even debate against adding go:generate because they were afraid people would use it to get something like generics. To say it is for generics is to grossly mischaracterize the feature.

Given that this is the only way Go provides to gain access to generic-like behavior, you shouldn't be surprised when people use it that way, and the intent of the team is quite irrelevant.

It's an opensource project. Why don't you contribute a better solution? Or are you too lazy?

Just because it is open source does not me (a) that your changes will be mainlined, (b) that your changes will be even considered or (c) that you will logistically be able to maintain an ongoing fork.

Saying "it's open source so you can just add feature X or change feature B" only works if you are part of some core team or are respected via other means. Github is littered with projects that have lots of Pull Requests that never get pulled.

I'd argue that making the changes you desire in an open-source project and forking the project is immeasurably more productive than complaining about it on HN. (IMHO)

There are many cases where project forks become more popular than the original project itself.

> Just because it is open source does not me (a) that your changes will be mainlined, (b) that your changes will be even considered or (c) that you will logistically be able to maintain an ongoing fork.

Or d) that I have any time in my life to undertake such work.

It's a project were all decisions taken by the core 3-4 person team are final and absolute. Open-source != bazaar.

This is an odd comment considering the entire point of this discussion is that a bad choice has been foisted on the project and criticism flatly rejected by the core team. Why do you believe a "better solution" would be accepted?

You have a very naïve view of the world and an unrealistic conception of what open source is.

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