[bmon]

If language features were free we'd likely have had generics for a long time now. Unfortunately generics is a trade-off: you get development speed/ease and pay for it in compile time, binary size and/or execution speed.

This seems to be slowly changing, but Go was designed to be a solution to Google problems - python being slow but some c++ applications taking literal hours to compile. Keeping that perspective in mind makes it easier to understand why Go maintainers have not accepted an implementation of generics into the language yet.

[atilaneves]

If you maintain type safety, you'll pay in increased compile times with or without generics. You'll either hand-roll an implementation for each type (https://golang.org/pkg/sort/) or you'll generate code before actually compiling. The problem doesn't go away.