[mvzink]

The thing is, you can do that with interface{} and you don't even need type switching. It's awkward, but considering that the rarity with which interface{} is necessary (at least in my experience), much less interface{} with type switching, I really don't see a big gain in generics. I agree with jff, it seems most people who complain about the lack of generics are those who haven't written much code without generics.

[TylerE]

You lose a lot of type safety via interface{}. I'm currently writing a server that makes heavy use of []interface{} and I hate it. For many, most, maybe even all, code pathes in the app I could 100% static-type if Go allowed for something akin to Haskell's generies. Basically I bundle around a type `APIVal` (an alias for []interface{}), but everywhere I either take as an argument or return an APIVal, I can tell you exactly what type the underlying slice items "really" have, but I can't assert that at compile time, and it kinda bugs me.