> Generics seemingly split the community. May be some libraries won’t get used because they picked the wrong side.
I haven't really observed that at all.
One thing that is going on is there hasn't been a massive disruption while everyone stops to rewrite the world in generics, and generics are not suddenly everywhere, which is what some people had predicted would happen. I think part of the reason is that in some cases another solution (closures or interfaces or whatever) can be a better fit, and the evolutionary approach to generics that Go took means you can use generics in conjunction with non-generic libraries or other pre-existing approaches without suffering from an ecosystem split.
# show the impact of cutting any package
goda cut ./...:all
which prints a sorted ASCII table with stats like 'size:4.4MB loc:134171' for each package, which is an estimate the savings you'd get if you eliminated that package from your binary. That is a great way to see what is unexpectedly large compared to its value.
goda has a bunch of other capabilities around dependency analysis, and was written by long-time Go contributor Egon Elbre. The examples in the README are the best way to get started after 'go install github.com/loov/goda@latest'.
> Looking around at some UTF-8 background, I see the same incorrect story being repeated over and over. The incorrect version is:
1. IBM designed UTF-8.
2. Plan 9 implemented it.
> That's not true. UTF-8 was designed, in front of my eyes, on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992.
FWIW, this is maybe an area where Go goes against the grain a bit and goes out of its way to not allow code you just downloaded to execute anything while you are building.
For things like 'go generate', the convention is to check in the results, which means a consumer of a package has the results without executing code:
FWIW, there is a proposal to add telemetry to LLVM [0] and Rust used to have telemetry [1], both off by default. Some things in the node.js world have telemetry enabled by default, like Next.js [3].
Some people are posting here as if this is already decided -- AFAICT, that's not the case. It's not even a formal proposal yet, and the stated intent was to start a conversation around something concrete. (For context, this is standard for how the Go project approaches large topics, including for example I think there were something like ~8 very detailed generics design drafts from the core Go team over ~10 years).
It sounds like the Go team is going to take some time to look into some of the alternative approaches suggested in the feedback collected so far.
In any event, this is obviously a topic people are very passionate about, especially opt-in vs. opt-out, but I guess I would suggest not giving up hope quite yet.
FWIW, people had started to post obscene ASCII drawings, were using various curse words, and there were many, many repetitive comments across the ~400 comments posted.
From what I understand of the conversation there, the core Go team said they were going to take some time to digest the feedback, including [0]:
> The goal here is a productive conversation that aims at better understanding of different positions. Many comments here have contributed to that, and I am grateful for them. To be extra clear, the people who have been discussing opt-in vs opt-out respectfully and with reasoned arguments are most welcome here and have been an important part of the signal, not the noise. Thank you to them in particular.
> Much of the moderation is being done by volunteer contributors working valiantly to keep the conversation on track, polite, useful, and non-repetitive. I appreciate their efforts.
> This discussion has in fact scaled somewhat beyond what GitHub discussions can reasonably manage (I just spent a while clicking every "load more" link on the page to make ^F work again), which is causing even more repetition, so I will probably lock the discussion at the end of the day and take some time to think about the feedback we've gathered so far.
> people had started to post obscene ASCII drawings, were using various curse words, and there were many, many repetitive comments across the ~400 comments posted
Sounds like an appropriate and commensurate response to this terrible idea.
A fix for the loop variable closure problem is now in the official proposal process, which is how language changes happen in Go.
It’s a concrete proposal from the core Go team and seems to be on track for acceptance:
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/60078
An implementation is already available on tip and in the upcoming Go 1.21 release behind a GOEXPERIMENT flag.
The community reaction has been extremely positive. As one approximate measure, an earlier draft of the proposal had 671 upvotes and with 0 downvotes:
https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/56010