Comment by sa46

> But you also went 13 years without generics

Go shipped with generics (aka bounded parametric polymorphism), but only for built-in types: slices, arrays, and maps. That, with subtyping via interfaces, handled most demand for generics. The most common pain point was custom containers.

Go was first released in November 2009. Russ Cox posted "The Generic Dilemma" [1] in December 2009. The comments show the generics debate raging from the earliest days.

As a fun side note, I forgot I posted a comment on that post pointing to Ada's generics. I was in college, and Ada was our intro language.

[1]: https://research.swtch.com/generic

> the designers didn't want that complexity inside Go.

Yes, with some nuance. Go's goal of writing server programs didn't require the type-system complexity and run-time hit of user-defined generics. [2]

> Go was intended as a language for writing server programs [...] Polymorphic programming did not seem essential [...] so was initially left out for simplicity. > > Generics are convenient but they come at a cost in complexity in the type system and run-time. It took a while to develop a design that we believe gives value proportionate to the complexity.

[2]: https://go.dev/doc/faq#beginning_generics

Out of curiosity, I collected all proposals for Go's journey to generics. https://gist.github.com/jschaf/eaa7aff1af14ea7276a18a1b7370d...