▲ 15 ▼ Toward Go 2

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go2

blog.golang.org posted by kenny 2726 days ago

This is the text of my talk today at Gophercon 2017, asking for the entire Go community's help as we discuss and plan Go 2. We will add a link to the video when it becomes available.

▲ gopher 2724 days ago ▼
Really nice to see this talk, and that the Go team are considering how best to introduce breaking changes, and also consulting with users of Go about what they'd like to see change and what problems they've encountered. One of the things I love about Go is how stable it is (which is probably a lot of hard work behind the scenes). It's boring, as I think Brad said in some talk, which is exactly what you want in a language (as opposed to libraries or apps, which can be a bit more adventurous).

It does seem Russ is trying to solicit problems rather than proposed solutions at this stage - always the hardest part of

I'm a little mystified as to why Generics are so contentious and excite the madding crowd so much over at reddit or HN on this topic. At the moment it might be partly that people have decided somehow the Go developers are hostile to generics rather than simply cautious about them (I think it's the latter). The built in functions acting on containers do feel like a bit of an ugly special case - just enough generic functions to get the job done I imagine was the thinking when they were put in, but why not let end users create generic functions? Nowadays this is expected, and in most languages (not C++) works quite well if used sparingly. I wonder if their hesitation is partly what if it is not used sparingly?

Things I'd like to see addressed:
- Errors - would be nice to see better error types (encapsulating possible error and value), and neater returns (get rid of if err == nil {return nil,nil,nil,err})
- Nil - wish they hadn't put it in, too late now though I suppose
- Maybe get rid of the distinction between []byte and string
- Containers - would be nice to see some facility for making better containers which can act on many types, mapping a slice of type [] - sounds like they are considering some form of generics to handle this.
- Cleaner stdlib - again lots of things that could be tidied and then fixed in user code with gofix.
Russ on Generics from the reddit thread on this story:

Re generics: A few people have misinterpreted the part of my talk mentioning generics as saying I don't know any possible use cases for generics, sometimes followed up by talking about how important type-safe containers are. Obviously I know about type-safe containers.

The point in that paragraph, which was brief due to time reasons, was that if you don't have specific use cases in front of you, you can't tell whether the design covers them. Even "type-safe containers" is not very specific. If all we need is type-safe map/set/etc then a very basic polymorphism is OK and we can skip generic methods.
Mostly though I'd like my Go 1 code to just run with Go 2, without a massive painful migration for all those big projects and libraries that are already written in Go 1. Sounds great that they're considering backporting any changes they can, which is great.
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