[btilly]

Which interfaces-based solution?

The one used by sort is a hack that only works for some of the things that you would want to do.

The one where you use introspection performs badly and isn't typesafe.

The tree implementation in the article cannot be done in a safe and performant way in Go today.

[haolez]

The one mentioned in the article.

It's not a hack: it's a runtime equivalent that requires that your type implements some interface.

[btilly]

It is a hack. The article lists a whole series of things that are standard in other languages that you can't do in go. Here are some examples:

  Find smallest/largest element in slice
  Find average/standard deviation of slice
  Compute union/intersection of maps
  Find shortest path in node/edge graph
  Apply transformation function to slice/map, returning new slice/map

And here are data structures that other languages have but go does not:

  Sets
  Self-balancing trees, with efficient insertion and traversal in sorted order
  Multimaps, with multiple instances of a key
  Concurrent hash maps, supporting parallel insertions and lookups with no single lock

If it were not a hack, then go would not have these limitations.

[majewsky]

> Multimaps, with multiple instances of a key

Isn't this just map[Key][]Value? The standard library uses these in several places, e.g. url.Values and http.Header, with assorted utility functions.

[btilly]

You should send that feedback to the author of the article. I literally just cut and pasted those lists.