First: I ninja-edited my comment after the fact with a thought that occurred to me after I posted, so apologies there.

Anyway, yeah, no argument there at all.

I'll be honest, as an outsider that's somewhat familiar with Pike's obsession with simplicity in Go, I'm actually a bit surprised this is getting in. It does seem like the kind of high-complexity feature that was deliberately excluded from the language as part of its overall design ethos.

But it really comes down to a weighing of pros and cons. Generics have the potential (though definitely not the guarantee!) to trade off developer complexity for compiler and toolchain complexity, and the preference on that choice is a personal one.