On Thu, Dec 31, 2020 at 5:42 AM Kevin Chadwick <m8il1i...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 12/30/20 6:38 PM, Ian Lance Taylor wrote: > > I don't think this is accurate. Surveys express a clear and > > consistent desire for generics that is far ahead of requests for > > operator overloading or other language features. (To avoid > > misunderstanding I'll say again that changes to the Go language are > > not driven by polls.) > > Firstly, I appreciate that dev is not driven by polls but it may be that > internally to Google these desires are true too. It is natural to be less > likely > to get an honest answer from many employees, of course.
I'm confident that Google employees are entirely willing to honestly express their feelings about Go. There is no company mandate to use Go, or to like it. (Of course I have no way to prove this.) I haven't seen any reason to think that Google employees are either more or less likely to prefer adding generics to Go than people outside of Google. It's not necessarily obvious, but there are Google employees on golang-nuts arguing that Go doesn't need generics. > If Generics is something wanted by the designers without or little debate > aside > from the form, then just say so and end the discussion? I don't think it's that simple. For a long time now the Go FAQ has said "Generics are convenient but they come at a cost in complexity in the type system and run-time. We haven't yet found a design that gives value proportionate to the complexity, although we continue to think about it." What we are considering now is whether the current design draft gives value proportionate to the complexity. I like to think that it does, but obviously I am biased. And the only way to avoid that bias is to open up the discussion to the community, which is what we've been doing over the last couple of years. In other words, sure, we could say "we want generics." And I think that for many of the language designers that is a true statement. But it's also true that we only want generics if the language can remain sufficiently simple and easy to use. So the bare statement "we want generics" doesn't get us anywhere useful. It doesn't end the discussion. It just starts it. > Also, whilst understanding that voluntary submission has it's benefits in > terms > of avoiding suggestion; that data has already been acquired. I wonder what the > result would be given a number of options. I probably can't think of many of > the > good requests, so this could be fuelled by past submissions. I can't remember > hitting a null pointer in my code but certainly have in stdlib network > libraries > (missing an & etc.) > > > Null pointer panic avoidance via automatic error return (what happened before > panics?) > > enhanced Gomobile support > > enhanced tinygo support > > Generics > > Flutter, Go cooperation > > ... > > No changes These are all very different kinds of things. For example, I think it's a category error to think that working on generics somehow means that we have worse Gomobile support. To the best of my knowledge, the people working on generics have never worked on Gomobile, and vice-versa. 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/CAOyqgcWBiPpMnzkAkfB2tb8VvTM8m1FyXVhHt6iRzv2Pyvfzew%40mail.gmail.com.
