Generics

This week in Mainz was JAX 2023 again, organized by Software & Support. It was nice, because slowly the conferences are getting more full, more real again. JAX was also hybrid and the organizers put a lot of effort into streaming all workshops and talks in parallel and connecting visitors at home via chat. But it’s not the same as on-site, sharing, discussing, laughing, eating and drinking. As I said, the conference consisted of workshops on Monday and Friday, and three days of keynotes, talks and panel discussions from Tuesday through Thursday.

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