Re:Why Go Is Not Good (2014)
by gendoikari on Wednesday December 09, 2015 @11:01AM
(#10704397)
About generics, this is highly debatable. This is a design choice, it's not a decision made by accident.
You'll surely gonna have boilerplate code in some cases, but all the language will be a lot more readable, and simple.
Simplicity it's the most wanted feature of Go, from the designers perspective, I think.
In the long term it's preferable to have explicit and simple code, instead of complex magic.
This is a correct view? We'll see.
Honestly I'm starting to appreciate that. They may have a good point.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
How is code with generics more complex than without it?
Re:Why Go Is Not Good (2014)
by gendoikari on Wednesday December 09, 2015 @02:34PM
(#10706132)
For example the C++ templates rules are themselves a turing-complete language.
If by generics you meant some really basic features, I think you can do pretty well with interfaces. They're already in the language.
If by generics you meant the full-package, i think you could end up with something pretty complex all the time.
Most generic implementations are not Turing-complete, and looking at C++, this doesn't sound like a particularly tempting proposition.
And while I'm not particularly familiar with Go, I don't see how you can get a feature set equivalent to a simple implementation like Java's out of Go interfaces ("you can just cast" is not a good answer).
Re:Why Go Is Not Good (2014)
by gendoikari on Wednesday December 09, 2015 @05:58PM
(#10707441)
I'm probably missing the use case. What is the problem that you are thinking of, you can't solve with a Go interface?
Say, a generic container.
They're talking about the compiler and the language spec not Go code.
That's not how I interpret parent's comment.
Re:Why Go Is Not Good (2014)
by TuringTest on Wednesday December 09, 2015 @11:27AM
(#10704604)
> all the language will be a lot more readable, and simple. Simplicity it's the most wanted feature of Go
This is what Java designers thought as well. See where this has led them.
Without generics, you can never write a type safe datastructure. I can't imagine the hubris that thinks the language already contains all of the datastructures it needs.
This isn't true. You can write a type safe data structure. It is simply for one type; you can't share it. That inability to share is the part that generics fixes, but saying you can't write type safe structures is inaccurate.
[deleted]
> to keep the language spec and compiler simple
How is this not a design choice?