[riobard]

I'm wondering if we could abuse type alias to fake generics somehow? E.g.

  // file tree.go
  type T = YourConcreteType
  type TreeNode struct {
    Value T
  }
  // rest of tree implementation

Then you can just copy the file and replace YourConcreteType at the top and voila!

Seems simpler to use than the unicode hack here https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_...

[stewbrew]

Now make that a compile time thing that happens on imports and that doesn't generate temporary source files and whoop you have modules with generics. Oops, I forgot that there are some unsolvable obstacles to be resolved.

[jhgb]

I have been wondering for quite some time how one could implement that. That is, not in the sense of how to code that, but rather how few changes one would have to make to the language to get as many effects as possible in the direction of genericity. There is some inspiration in Lua, Scheme48 and some dialects of ML (functors, I believe?) in the form of "higher-order modules", where the module (would be package in Go?) could have parameters that you'd have to supply when importing it. The things you could obviously supply would be at least constants, functions and types. (One might look at functions as types of computational processes, though, and at function signatures/interfaces as their respective type classes. This perspective could subsume functions as types, and perhaps integers as nullary functions returning an integer.) The question is how to reasonably do the import strings. Good thing about Go is that you already have provisions in the language in the sense that the string can be technically arbitrary. A subset of the reflection interface could additionally be evaluated at compile time to provide for ad-hoc specializations of generic code by writing straightforward code that would be easily eliminated/specialized in a module instantiation (like loops over struct fields etc.)

[stewbrew]

Are you saying, it wouldn't be too difficult to implement this in the go compiler but the crucial question is (just) the syntax of the import string?

[jhgb]

The interface to the feature is perhaps more important than the complexity of the implementation because it will affect many more people - only a few programmers will work on the compiler but tens of thousands of programmers will be writing code using it. I make no claims as to how complex this would be to implement, but it probably wouldn't stand out. The interesting thing is that this shouldn't necessitate any changes in the language of generic modules (no <>s and such). It merely parameterizes some types and constants in a module. As such, after a certain phase in compilation, the process is the same as for a non-generic module so perhaps it's a low-complexity change in the implementation, too (not just in the language spec).

[stewbrew]

> no <>s and such

Funny. The first thing that came to mind was:

    import (
        bar "github.com/name/bar"
        baz "github.com/name/baz"
        foo "github.com/name/foo"
        foo_bar "foo<A=bar, B=baz>"
    )

[jhgb]

You could, but the strings are not the language proper. There's, e.g., no relational expressions in your import strings (yet!), so there's no ambiguity in parsing it. I'd actually use parentheses anyway, since type parameters are still parameters (this could give the parameter list a "Pythonic" syntax which has been shown to work well already).

[ptman]

What if I want both TreeNode<float64> and TreeNode<rune>?

[riobard]

Easy. You copy the original file twice and put them in two different sub directories, say treef64 and treerune.

[osteele]

Not copy – symbolic link. Then there’s just the one source file.

Not that I would want this in my project. But as a hack, it’s even better than it first sounds.