On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 11:03 AM Sebastien Rosset <sros...@gmail.com> wrote: > > @ianlancetaylor , thank you for the quick reply. The reason I was asking is > because potentially this could have been used to fix `type ObjectIdentifier > []int` in the `encoding/asn1` package and the `crypto/x509` package. > Currently these package are not fully compliant with the ASN.1 specification, > which means in practice some certificates cannot be parsed. > > > I am trying to fix the encoding/asn1 and crypto/x509 package by adding > support for OID values that are greater than 2^31. There are multiple ways to > fix the issues, and unfortunately it won't be possible to simply change the > ObjectIdentifier type because that would break too many applications. If it's > not possible to change the type, then most alternatives seem to be somewhat > cumbersome. For reference the PR is https://github.com/golang/go/pull/39795.
Thanks, understood. Generics don't solve all problems. I agree that there seems to be a way that we could modify generics to solve this particular problem. But it means introducing an idea that the rest of the language has decided to reject: default values for arguments. I don't think it would be consistent with the language to permit default values for type arguments when we do not permit default values for non-type arguments. While we don't have to be strictly consistent here, I think we need a good reason to break consistency. And in the larger scheme of things I don't think that making it easier to make a backward compatible change to one specific package, a package that is not all that widely used, is a good enough reason. I'm not claiming to have the final word, but that is my opinion. Ian -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/CAOyqgcWD3wYG13pNUociK6vwHOsCH5X_05b9wEhxKcDu8_o0MQ%40mail.gmail.com.
