How generics are implemented in Go 1.18

Re:How generics are implemented in Go 1.18 by simias on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @05:07AM (#30525683)

I also couldn't help gloat a bit thinking about all these bad faith arguments I heard coming from the Go community over the years about how the lack of generics was not such a bit deal and generics sucked anyway. I especially remember one particular document where some Go devs claimed to make an "unbiased" study of the pros and cons of generics and it was ridiculously one sided (if somebody remembers what this document was I'd love to read it again, especially now that Go has generics).

That being said I'm happy to see that Go now attempts to find a tradeoff between generics and compile time, if their approach proves successful hopefully it could lead to improvements for other languages as well.

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Re:How generics are implemented in Go 1.18 by foldr on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @05:12AM (#30525716)

Does it help to make such vague references to bad faith arguments? If you want to point to something specific that someone said, then fine, but otherwise it seems like you're just stirring up discord.

No programming language is loved only by rhetorical geniuses. Of course you can find some people who've said some silly things about Go or generics. But so what? You can also find people who've said silly things about your favourite programming language.

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Re:How generics are implemented in Go 1.18 by kerkeslager on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @10:45AM (#30528581)

> Does it help to make such vague references to bad faith arguments? If you want to point to something specific that someone said, then fine, but otherwise it seems like you're just stirring up discord.

Sorry, but anyone who's been watching Go's development long enough remembers this: it's not being made up.

Dischord is good if the alternative is consensus around a backwards language that wastes huge amounts of people's time and money.

> Of course you can find some people who've said some silly things about Go or generics. But so what? You can also find people who've said silly things about your favourite programming language.

The problem being that in the case of Go, the people saying silly things are the primary developers of the language.

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Re:How generics are implemented in Go 1.18 by foldr on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @11:15AM (#30528958)

Again, you're just saying that a bunch of people said some unspecified silly things. It's difficult to take that seriously as a critique of Go or any of the people involved in designing it.

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Re:How generics are implemented in Go 1.18 by simias on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @02:03PM (#30531337)

I wasn't making an argument at all really, just sharing my point of view. I also didn't think that the claim that many bad faith arguments regarding the utility of generics came from the Go community would be scrutinized and needed supporting. Besides it's irrelevant and petty to bring it up now, I'm more interested to see how these new generics fare.

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Re:How generics are implemented in Go 1.18 by foldr on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @02:35PM (#30531804)

It is irrelevant and petty to bring it up now – but you have. I think you should either withdraw the comment or point to an example.

Making broad brush accusations of bad faith just doesn't help to get to the bottom of any technical issue. It's fine to express your opinion, but if you publicly say bad things about a community, you should be prepared to substantiate those claims when asked.

HN commentary on Go seems to repeatedly return to increasingly exaggerated and vitriolic claims about the supposed idiocy of the Go team or Go community in relation to generics. The factual foundation of these claims is virtually nil. It appears to be some kind of group false memory phenomenon, where vague second hand reports, endlessly repeated, become accepted as fact.

I would therefore invite you to actually try to find some examples of these bad faith arguments, for your own benefit if nothing else.

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