Comment by morsecodist
1 day ago
Fair I stopped using Go pre-generics so I am pretty out of date. I just remember having this conversation about generics and at the time there was a large anti-generics group. Is it a lot better with generics? I was worried that a lot of the library code was already written pre-generics.
The generics are a weak mimicry of what generics could be, almost as if to say "there we did it" without actually making the language that much more expressive.
For example, you're not allowed to write the following:
That fails because methods can't have type parameters, only structs and functions. It hurts the ergonomics of generics quite a bit.
And, as you rightly point out, the stdlib is largely pre-generics, so now there's a bunch of duplicate functions, like "strings.Sort" and "slices.Sort", "atomic.Pointer" and "atomic.Value", quite possible a sync/v2 soon https://github.com/golang/go/issues/71076, etc.
The old non-generic versions also aren't deprecated typically, so they're just there to trap people that don't know "no never use atomic.Value, always use atomic.Pointer".