[Fwd: Re: [go-nuts] Re: Generics false dichotomy]

[logicchains]

On Monday, 17 February 2014 at 19:08:46 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
> On 2/17/14, 10:59 AM, Jesse Phillips wrote:
>>> Andrei
>>
>> It looks like you've been completely ignored.
>
> This may be partly a logistics issue - my name appears garbled.

Have you posted to that Google group before? If you hadn't, you
would have had to wait a few hours for your post to be moderated
before it appeared. I believe this is what happened, as I was
active on the thread around the time it says you posted, but I
don't recall seeing your post. I imagine that's why nobody
noticed your comment, as it was inserted in the middle of the
thread, so only people reading the whole thread from start to
finish would notice it.

Regarding the whole generics thing, I think it's important to
note that the focus on them slowing compile time has been by the
community, not so much the core designers. The language devs
state that they just haven't found a generics model they're
comfortable with yet.

It's also work noting that Go's developers are from a C
background; while they are of course extremely competent, there
is no substitute for experience, and in my understanding they
don't have the same experience with templates that you and Walter
have via you being a C++ guru and him having written a C++
compiler. Lacking that experience, a much greater amount of
foresight and planning is required to ensure that the form of
generics implemented doesn't come back to bite Go, so I think
their delay is understandable. There's also the Go 1.x
compatability promise, so even if implementing generics was the
number one priority in the language, it still couldn't happen
until a few years from now when Go 2.0 is released.