[zemo]

having played with generics over the past few weeks: my guess is that there will be a period of widespread misuse, the first six months or so after 1.18 is released. So... between February and August of next year I'm expecting a lot of the Go discourse to be characterized by a very poor signal to noise ratio. I think there's virtually no chance that Go 1.18 will come out and people will use generics well; people will use generics poorly before they use them well.

A bunch of people will write libraries that utilize generics in some way that's not very orthogonal to the rest of the Go ecosystem. They'll put these libraries out as quickly as possible, because they want a first-mover advantage in picking up adoption. A handful of people will take their time and learn how to utilize generics in a way that is native to Go. Eventually those people come out of the woodwork, and it turns out that utilizing generics in Go looks different than it looked in some other language, so a lot of the early assumptions about how to use them were wrong. A bunch of those early libraries turned out to be badly designed once actually deployed into the real world, so they fade out of use as their problem domains get written by newer libraries that utilize generics in a manner more orthogonal to the rest of the Go ecosystem. A few of those libraries picked up significant market share, and maybe a startup has shipped stuff that generates revenue with those libraries, so they fund those projects, which continue to exist as a result of pure inertia. So now you have some big libraries written in like ... March of 2022, which are just bad, but people keep promoting them because they have a vested interest in doing so, but the ecosystem at large moves on, and by late 2022, generics will fit in very nicely with Go and not complicate things in an unnatural way. I'm wary of what's coming in the short term, but optimistic of what's coming in the long term as a result of this change.