Tideland Go Slices v0.1.1

Development

So far I had not missed generics in Go. Much could be solved via interfaces or closures. And with the disgusting syntactic aberrations of other languages when dealing with generics, I was rather afraid that the elegant simplicity of Go could be lost. As of Go 1.18, Google’s language now handles generics after much discussion.

I have always appreciated the implicit simplicity with which, for example, types in a statement like

imAString := myStringReturningFunc(some, "input")

can be derived. Why should I specify the type of imAString too? It is the return type of myStringReturningFunc() , so this clear. It feels like in dynamically typed languages. And it is nice that we managed to transfer this ease to the generics as well. Now it’s just a matter of not polluting your own code with unnecessary generics and possibly used constraints.

Nevertheless, Go version 1.19 has been released in the meantime and I had not yet found a use for generics. But I wanted to give it a try. Then I thought of the feature-rich module lists in the Erlang/OTP language. I wanted to use this for slices in Go. The result is my new library Tideland Go Slices v0.1.1. Thanks to generics it allows easy and comfortable handling of slices of any type. Some instructions would be for example

vs1 := slices.FoldL(func(s string, i int) int { return len(s) + i }, 0, myStringSlice)
vs2 := slices.Reverse(myCustomerStructSlice)
vs3 := slices.SortWith(func(cs []*Customer, i, j int) {
    return cs[i].Name < cs[j].Name
}, myCustomerStructSlice)
vs4 := slices.Unique(mySliceWithDuplicates)

Documentation and code can be found at

Have fun with it.