[oconnor663]

> it's hard to think of how you would improve on the actual underlying design.

I'm biased as a Rust fan in general, but I think Rust pretty much nails this. Rust distinguishes between a borrowing view of variable length (a slice, spelled &[T]) and an owned allocation of variable length (usually a Vec<T>). Go uses the same type for both, which makes the language smaller, but it leads to confusion about who's pointing to what when a slice is resized.

[jchw]

I do pretty much agree there, but also, I'm not sure that solves a whole lot of problems in the frame of Go. Since Go lacks ownership or constness as a concept, it would be weird if there weren't convenience functions for e.g. appending to a slice, because it's always possible for that to be done; if the language didn't do it, the end users could certainly write the function themselves. I think they would've needed to expand the language in order to make meaningful improvements to slices.