How many iterations of this do we have to go through? Go hasn't had mature dependency management since its inception and this constant thrash is really starting to make things difficult.

For all practical purposes dependency management for programming languages is a solved problem, with many open source examples. The only explanation for this constant re-invention that I can come up with (and that's shared among others I know) is that Google doesn't care/need a dependency tool because of their mono repo. Which is rather frustrating since we get features (cough aliases cough) forced down our throats when Google suddenly finds a need for them.

> For all practical purposes dependency management for programming languages is a solved problem

It's obviously not solved satisfactory.

Only because the golang core team seem to insist on reinventing every wheel either without considering prior art, or at least without considering why prior art went with a particular approach.

I swear I should put together a list of these instances.

> Only because the golang core team seem to insist on reinventing every wheel either without considering prior art, or at least without considering why prior art went with a particular approach.

The popular criticism is that Go isn't reinventing enough; that it's stuck in the 70's and it's not sufficiently innovative.

I think that's an inaccurate/misleading framing: the typical criticism is that it has seemed to ignore innovations from elsewhere, there's no suggestion that it needs to reinvent them. For instance, people consider generics a solved problem as there's numerous schemes invented by other languages, and critics think one of them should be able to work for Go.

Yes, but Go has specificities that make difficult to directly use the scheme used by other languages: Go is AOT compiled (we can't use C# generics), Go favors compilation speed (we can't use C++ template), Go lets the developer control memory layout with arrays and structs (we can't use OCaml generics), etc. Of course, Go should get inspiration from other languages, but adding generics is not easy as simply transposing another language implementation. There are multiple detailed proposals in the bug tracker that have failed for multiple reasons.

Swift has essentially all the same constraints, and fretting about compilation speed with the C++ approach are hard to stomach given one of the widely-used replacement is equivalent: manually copy-pasting code, instead of letting the compiler do it.

In any case, the truth of the complaint about generics isn't actually relevant here: the rebuttal is to "people complain about Go not reinventing enough", and they don't, as they (truthfully or otherwise) think it is ignoring already researched and widely-implemented solutions to the problem and complain about this (that is, the complaint is "uninventing", not "not enough reinventing").

I didn't mention Swift and I should have. I agree it's close enough to Go to provide useful inspiration.

But even Swift implementation of generics has its issues and tradeoffs. Look for example at this thread about "Compile-time generic specialization" in Swift: https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mo...

Repeating that Go ignores "already researched and widely-implemented solutions" is getting old, really. Would you say that OCaml doesn't have shared memory multicore parallelism because it ignores already researched and widely-implemented solutions??? Would you say that Haskell garbage collector causes long runtime pauses because it ignores already researched and widely-implemented solutions??? The truth is that solving that kind of things is a lot more complex than just copy-paste the code from another language.

I'm... intimately familiar with generics in Swift. :) Like all systems it has trade-offs, but the decision it makes line up with the decisions you said Go wanted to also make.

In any case, that specific concern doesn't apply to Go, since it doesn't have overloading.

> Repeating that Go ignores "already researched and widely-implemented solutions" is getting old, really

Sure, but that still isn't the point of this discussion: it's not what people should be doing, or the underlying truth, it's what people are doing in practice and they are complaining about the Go team seemingly ignoring the past 40 years of programming language development, not complaining that they're not inventive enough.

You're right about the issue I mentioned which is irrelevant since there is no overloading in Go. Thanks for pointing it out.

I didn't know you worked on Rust and now on Swift :-)

What strategy does Swift use to compile a generic function or method? Does it generate only one polymorphic version of the code, or multiple specialized versions for each expected parameter types (often called code specialization or monomorphization)?

One polymorphic version, like OCaml or Haskell, not specializing like C++ or Rust.

The compiler can and does specialize functions as an optimization, but that's not necessary nor part of the semantic model.

I always thought that generating one polymorphic version would be a better fit for Go than generating multiple specialized versions.

It's interesting that Swift adopted this approach and confirms what you said earlier about Swift having essentially the same constraints as Go and being a good source of inspiration of Go.

What's the status of Swift on Linux, to write web services and connect to databases?