Generics in Go: Are We There Yet?

An exploration of Go’s transition to a multi-paradigm language

With the arrival of Generics — a feature that has certainly been dividing the Go community— Go is finally transitioning from a firmly imperative language to a multi-paradigm language. But are we there yet? Is this the Generics implementation that everyone has been waiting for?

In this article, I’ll try to answer these questions, making use of a functional Map/Reduce Api[1] I’ve been developing in Go. I’ll detail the issues and language design decisions I find more limiting along the way and also present a few workarounds for overcoming them. All of this, while exploring the power of Generics in Go 1.18!

So, Generics?

Some are arguing that Go’s simplistic mantra doesn’t quite adhere to what Generics allow creative brains to do. But just like spoken languages, programming languages are not statical constructs and evolve over time. The computation problems engineers are solving today, are certainly not the same we’ve used to solve 20 years ago, so it’s only natural that the tools we use to solve such problems evolve as well.

There are several concrete examples of how language evolution is driven by external factors. As multiple cores are now common, better abstractions for enabling parallel computation without requiring low-level locking primitives were born: concepts like Goroutines or other “lightweight threads” constructs are now natively supported by many programming languages.

With the advent of blockchain, smart contracts’ growing importance is making clear that its concept doesn’t have a strong equivalent in programming. It can be simulated by class, but it can be quite harmful to the way people are used to thinking about it (see how a bug written in a faulty DEFI smart-contract cost millions[2]). Then Solidity happened.

And Go is no exception. As Go has increasingly been used in large backends for performing very generic tasks, it’s imperative that its feature set is extended.

As a clean code evangelist, and a big fan of functional programming, I look at the new Generics in Go as a great opportunity to do the same-old generic things in an all-new better way. The functional…