The bytes.Clone() uses non-trivial trick under the hood - `append([]byte{}, b...)`. Compare it to a trivial loop behind maps.Clone().
The strings.Split() implementation is non-trivial because of performance optimizations.
The bytes.Equal() is actually written in highly tuned and optimized assembly in order to achieve high performance for inputs of various lengths.
Now compare this to trivial implementations behind generic-based functions for maps. And do not forget that these implementations may hurt performance because of excess memory allocations in Keys() and Values() functions or because the compiler may fail inlining the callback passed to DeleteFunc().
Those are good points about some of them being nontrivial.
Though part of why they’re optimized and in the stdlib in the first place is because they’re such common patterns. So without them people would end up writing trivial, unperformant, custom versions. So now that more routines can be moved into the stdlib, they can benefit from optimization later.
(I’m not sure how much the maps routines specifically can be optimized, but stdlib routines routines can generally be more aggressive with unsafe or asm or being coupled to the runtime and its quirks, like bytes.Clone, strings.Builder, etc.)
And there are still plenty of ubiquitous patterns that have been worth including in the stdlib even if they’re usually just simple loops that aren’t very optimizable. Like strings.Index is an easy loop to write, but it comes up so often. Or strings.Cut is basically just an if-statement. But it makes code clearer about its intentions; and optimizations to these down the road benefit everyone.
It’s also true that maps.Keys and maps.Values allocate slices, and that you could avoid this with a loop, but strings.Split, bytes.Split, regexp.FindAll, os.ReadDir return slices and are still worthwhile as opposed to specialized iterators for each one. As with any code, you’re conscious of memory allocations where it counts, and optimize as needed.
In fact, now that generics make it possible, the Go team has discussed using iterators (https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/54245), which would benefit strings.Split even further in addition to all the other slice-returning functions.
So generally you have three options for those slice-returning functions:
- Custom inline loop for some of them. More verbose, will probably be naive and not benefit from stdlib optimizations.
- Return a slice and iterate over it with a for loop. Creates allocations that could probably be avoided.
- Create a customized iterator for that type. Unfortunately, you can’t really use an ordinary for loop, and extra custom iterators for each type.
- Use generic iterators to benefit from the optimized functions and also avoid allocation overhead.
So part of the motivation is that now with generics there’s a variety of further optimizations available even to old functions like strings.Split and regexp.FindAll, in addition to opening up common patterns and optimizations for maps/slices/etc. to be included in the stdlib.
> Like strings.Index is an easy loop to write, but it comes up so often
Actually, strings.Index() is very non-trivial function partially written in assembly in order to achieve high performance [1]. This function is used in Go projects *much more frequently* than functions from the golang.org/x/exp/maps package.
> strings.Cut is basically just an if-statement
No, strings.Cut() has non-trivial code when comparing to a trivial loop for map copy or for map delete [2].
> It’s also true that maps.Keys and maps.Values allocate slices, and that you could avoid this with a loop, but strings.Split, bytes.Split, regexp.FindAll, os.ReadDir return slices and are still worthwhile as opposed to specialized iterators for each one.
The *key* difference between maps.{Key,Value} and the mentioned functions from the standard library is that it is trivial to write the `for k, v := range m` instead of maps.{Key,Value} and avoid memory allocations, while it isn't trivial to write the corresponding code without memory allocations, which substitutes strings.Split() or other mentioned functions from the standard library.
