Comment by cookiengineer

I'd argue that Go is somewhere in between static C and memory safe VM languages, because the compiler always tries to "monomorphize" everything as much as possible.

Generic methods are somewhat an antipattern to how the language was designed from the start. That is kind of the reason they're not there yet, because Go maintainers don't want boxing in their runtime, and also don't want compile time expansions (or JIT compilation for that matter).

So I'd argue that this way of handling compilation is more low level than other VM based languages where almost everything is JITed now.