[gendoikari]

About generics, this is highly debatable. This is a design choice, it's not a decision made by accident. You'll surely gonna have boilerplate code in some cases, but all the language will be a lot more readable, and simple. Simplicity it's the most wanted feature of Go, from the designers perspective, I think. In the long term it's preferable to have explicit and simple code, instead of complex magic. This is a correct view? We'll see. Honestly I'm starting to appreciate that. They may have a good point.

[mercurial]

How is code with generics more complex than without it?

[gendoikari]

For example the C++ templates rules are themselves a turing-complete language. If by generics you meant some really basic features, I think you can do pretty well with interfaces. They're already in the language. If by generics you meant the full-package, i think you could end up with something pretty complex all the time.

[mercurial]

Most generic implementations are not Turing-complete, and looking at C++, this doesn't sound like a particularly tempting proposition.

And while I'm not particularly familiar with Go, I don't see how you can get a feature set equivalent to a simple implementation like Java's out of Go interfaces ("you can just cast" is not a good answer).

[gendoikari]

I'm probably missing the use case. What is the problem that you are thinking of, you can't solve with a Go interface?

[mercurial]

Say, a generic container.

[rbjorklin]

They're talking about the compiler and the language spec not Go code.

[mercurial]

That's not how I interpret parent's comment.

[TuringTest]

> all the language will be a lot more readable, and simple. Simplicity it's the most wanted feature of Go

This is what Java designers thought as well. See where this has led them.

[moultano]

Without generics, you can never write a type safe datastructure. I can't imagine the hubris that thinks the language already contains all of the datastructures it needs.

[kyledj]

This isn't true. You can write a type safe data structure. It is simply for one type; you can't share it. That inability to share is the part that generics fixes, but saying you can't write type safe structures is inaccurate.