[robbrit]

A lot of the time in Go you do have to copy-paste-tweak - sorting lists for example requires quite a bit of boiler plate.

That doesn't mean the code above is good, just that the lack of generics sometimes makes copy-pasting in Go inevitable.

[jstimpfle]

Can't you just do something like qsort()?

[robbrit]

Technically yes, however it is not type-safe. Idiomatic Go usually tries to be at least somewhat type-safe, and so the standard library's sort package uses interfaces instead of comparison functions. This is a bit more tedious to write unfortunately.