[baby]

I think if Golang would have been invented a couple of years later it def would have had sum types. But then, Rust probably wouldn’t have had its insane tooling that is most likely inspired by golang

[kaba0]

It’s not like sum types weren’t known a decade before that. Or generics. They just didn’t care.

[masklinn]

These issues were also brought up immediately when the language was first shown, alongside nulls, tuples, error handling, etc…

[baby]

what imperative language had them?

[randomdata]

I doubt it. It seems quite apparent that Thompson just wanted to take another stab at creating the next generation in the B -> NB (New B) -> C -> Go family tree. It would have likely been named D if the name wasn't already taken.

Pike slapped his Newsqueak's CSP paradigm on top and the rest is history.

[pjmlp]

Go is basically an AOT compiled version of Limbo with the method syntax and UNSAFE package from Oberon-2, and they stopped there.

[0xjnml]

> I think if Golang would have been invented a couple of years later it def would have had sum types.

How to combine sum types and a precise garbage collector?

[seer-zig]

They're not mutually exclusive. Scala and Haskell had them for a long time now, and Java got them relatively recently.

[0xjnml]

How can a precise garbage collector work when it does not know if a value is or is not a pointer?