[papsosouid]

>I don't think that anyone is expecting a PL research breakthrough to provide some generics panacea

That already happened. In 1976. There is simply no excuse for this disingenuous "oh but go is magic and special and can't do it the same way everyone else can" nonsense. If people want that argument to be taken seriously, then they need to start offering actual specific problems with parametric polymorphism as it would apply to go. Not just saying "we're special".

[ominous_prime]

No one is saying generics can't be implemented in go, or that go is "special".

Implementing generics requires tradeoffs of some sort -- compile-time and size, runtime efficiency, or language-complexity. The creators didn't want to accept any of these compromises, at least for the initial release of go.

[papsosouid]

No, it does not require a trade off. That is exactly what I just pointed out. There is no such problem. Parametric polymorphism was solved in 1976. None of the things you mentioned are actual problems, they simply do not exist. Those are invented excuses. If Rob seriously still hasn't bothered to read CS papers from 30+ years ago, that is very unfortunate. But it does not mean the problem wasn't solved, it just means he is unaware of the solution.

[Daishiman]

I'm more willing to trust Rob Pike on his assesment than a random Internet comment from someone who has neither knowledge of Go nor has read the comments on their mailing list.

[azth]

Appeal to authority. You don't have to trust some random comment on the Internet. Read a little about how generics are implemented in other languages today, and you will be able to see the points the commenter is making.

[Daishiman]

An appeal to authority is not an argumentative fallacy if the authority is, umm, actually qualified to talk about whatever they're saying. There are at most a couple dozen people more qualified and able to talk about the upsides and downsides of programming languages who, moreover, have seen them in action in the course of several decades of computing history (much of which was directly due to this man's actions).

Really, if you have a language, compiler, and operating systems designer of the caliber of Rob Pike saying that generics introduce a lot of issues, I'm going to need some damned good evidence to the contrary.

[papsosouid]

Yes, it is still a fallacy. If you have an argument, you can make it without trying to rely on "famous person X agrees". And you seem to be confused about who Rob Pike is. He simply worked at bell labs. After everything important had already happened. He had nothing to do with the creation of unix or C, he just gets lumped in with them because he was at bell labs after the fact.

[pkroll]

Quick searches turn up slow compile times as a definite issue with generics. Which means papsosouid's premise is wrong: there IS an issue, and it's one of the ones the Go team considers important. EDIT: read name wrong.

[azth]

It has been claimed by the D people that D compiles faster than Go. D has a very powerful generic/template system -- even more powerful than C++. Yet, they seem to have solved the compile speed problem, while preserving runtime types (it is a systems language after all).

As I mentioned in another comment in this thread, I have a feeling that the issue with generics in Go is how some language features interact with each other (and not in a good way). Mainly interfaces and object composition. I think this is a good indication that the authors were not aware of several developments in language design at the time of making Go. Not everything is a tradeoff all the time. Certain problems have been solved.

[papsosouid]

>Quick searches turn up slow compile times as a definite issue with generics

Where? I can find nothing of the sort. And given that we have proof otherwise (compare D to go for example) it seems likely that you are choosing to interpret "some languages made their compilers slower" with "parametric polymorphism must make a compiler slower".