Comment by TheDong

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:

    type Option[T any] struct { t *T }

    func (o *Option[T]) Map[U any](f func(T) U) *Option[U] { ... }

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".