[klodolph]

The problem with void pointers is that if you make a mistake, you get undefined behavior. If you make a bad cast in Java, Go, or C#, instead, it fails. You get nil, you get an exception, or you get a panic, depending on how you do the cast, and which language you're using. None of these result in undefined behavior.

If you look at Java and C#, neither had generics either. You used casts, just like Go. It's safe, because the casts are safe (unlike void pointers). People started using Java and C# anyway, even though they didn't have generics.

Java then added generics in J2SE 5.0, which came out in 2004, when Java was nearly 10 years old. A year later, in 2005, C# added generics as well, with the release of C# 2.0.

Given that Go is about 11 years old now, it doesn't seem so out of place.

[pjmlp]

C# had generics already, they just weren't fully baked for 1.0 release and they decided to postpone them instead of delaying the .NET 1.0 release.

That is one of the reasons why the CLR already had most of the infrastrucure for proper handling of generic code instead of being a compiler only sugar.

"How generics were added to .NET"

https://mattwarren.org/2018/03/02/How-generics-were-added-to...