On Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 9:48 PM Ian Lance Taylor <i...@golang.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 1:24 AM Markus Heukelom > <markus.heuke...@gain.pro> wrote: > > > > Why not issue a poll on generics, was this ever done? (I could've missed > it, I am only following Go ~2 years). While the community has a vote in > accepting/rejecting the current generics proposal, the community was never > (really) asked if generics is desired in the first place and especially > what the scope of generics should be. Is that correct? > > I don't know of a poll specifically about generics. But for the past > several years we've done a Go community survey, and every year there > is significant support for adding generics to the language. For > example, although the results of the 2020 survey haven't been > assembled yet, you can see the results of the 2019 survey at > https://blog.golang.org/survey2019-results. In that survey when asked > > "Which critical language features do you need that are not available > in Go?", 25% of the survey takers answered the question, and of those > 79% mentioned generics. Previous years also showed support for adding > generics. Thanks for this, that's actually a lot higher than I would expect. It could be of interest to see the percentage of people who answered "generics" split by "years of any coding experience" and "years of go experience" (graph 2 and 3 in the blog post). It may be helpful in this discussion for people to see if their "peers" requested generics. I am not against generics, it can definitely be useful in some cases, although I too certainly worry quite a bit about the mess it can cause in other languages. Generics is a great tool for over-engineering. Of course this isn't definitive, since there was no clear > way for people they say that do not want generics. But it's also not > definitive in a different direction, which is that by and large people > who don't currently use Go didn't take the survey, and probably some > of them would also want generics. > > So while Go is not and never has been a poll-driven language, I think > it's reasonable to say that there is real support for adding generics. > > > > Another thought: there are many popular, type-safe programming language > with generics already. So if you really need generics, there's plenty to > pick from. There's not that many without, I can only name Go and C. So if > generics is added to Go there's far less choice to pick a modern type-safe > language that doesn't have generics. It's a feature that makes Go quite > special. > > Actually, C does have generics, through the preprocessor macro > mechanism. It's difficult to write, but it does provide the same kind > of functionality that would be available in Go if we added generics. For example, here is a compile-time-type-safe vector implementation in > C: > > > https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=blob;f=gcc/vec.h;h=cb871124ce2241402af05e4697a5e28904c462fb;hb=HEAD > > https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=blob;f=gcc/vec.c;h=85274c4e00c202e680761cef516bd17bb58b6261;hb=HEAD > > 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/CAMoB8rWJ%3DaOYYruQoJBrKY5NPGQHPdQZ8wSV%2BHSKMPSLofUrnw%40mail.gmail.com.
