gx VS proposal

Nice! Ebiten is a super nice API for Go. Lots there to be inspired by in API design. Another API I like a lot is Love for Lua (which also actually can be used from C++).

Re: the comments on here about the GC etc. -- I've posted about this a couple times before but I've been using a custom Go -> C++ compiler for hobby gamedev, which helps with perf, gives access to C/C++ APIs (I've been using Raylib and physics engines etc.) and also especially has good perf in WebAssembly. Another nice thing is you can add in some reflection / metaprogramming stuff for eg. serializing structs or inspector UI for game entity properties. I was briefly experimenting with generating GLSL from Go code too so you can write shaders in Go and pass data to them with shared structs etc.

The compiler: https://github.com/nikki93/gx

I've been using my own little Go (subset / my own extensions) -> C++ compiler -- https://github.com/nikki93/gx -- and found it to be a fun way to add some guardrails and nicer syntax over C++ usage. You get Go's package system and the syntax analyzers / syntax highlighters etc. just work.

Re: perf for hobby gamedev, I basically agree for native builds, but lately I've felt like Wasm support seems key for hobby gamedev (so you can have more people play your game / without downloading it / it works directly on mobile too without dealing with app or play store). And Go perf in Wasm unfortunately is not so good (I was hitting big GC pauses when trying to make a game with Ebiten and large images).

I ended up writing a Go -> C++ compiler. The games I've done with it don't use the GC at all but also don't manually manage memory -- they use an ECS api which helps. https://github.com/nikki93/gx -- the README links to development workflow video and complete example game code.

I've written my own Go (subset + extensions) -> C++ transpiler and using it on a game project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8He97Sl9iy0 -- No GC, it does have slices and has access to an entity/component API and with that I think you're basically set and don't need GC for games.

Example transpiler input / output: https://github.com/nikki93/gx/blob/master/example/main.gx.go... becomes https://gist.github.com/nikki93/97ff376abb6718427387bb9cca2f...

Hey thanks! The source code for the compiler itself is here: https://github.com/nikki93/gx along with a test / example under the 'example/' directory. This is the C++ output when compiling 'example/': https://gist.github.com/nikki93/b650c551ccb67490d8607980a582c468

The conclusion is pretty weird to me.

Go does rely on monomorphization for generics, just like C++ and Rust. The only difference is that this is an implementation detail, so Go can group multiple monomorphizations without worrying about anything else [1]. This form of hybrid monomorphization is being increasingly common, GHC does that and Rust is also trying to do so [2], so nothing special for Go here.

On the other hand, explaining variance as a lifted polymorphism is---while not incorrect per se---also weird in part because a lack of variance is at worst just an annoyance. You can always make an adopter to unify heterogeneous types. Rust calls it `Box`, Go happens to call it an interface type instead. Both languages even do not allow heterogeneous concrete (or runtime) types in a single slice! So variance has no use in both languages because no concrete types are eligible for variance anyway.

I think the conclusion got weird because the term "subtyping" is being misused. Subtyping, in the broadest sense, is just a non-trivial type relation. Many languages thus have a multiple notion of subtyping, often (almost) identical to each other but sometimes not. Go in particular has a lot of them, and even some relation like "T implements U" is a straightforward record subtyping. It is no surprise that the non-uniform value representation has the largest influence, and only monomorphization schemes and hetero-to-homogeneous adapters vary in this particular group.

[1] https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/generi...

[2] https://rust-lang.github.io/compiler-team/working-groups/pol...

https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/generi...

Go Team wanted generics since the start. It was always a problem implementing them without severely hurting compile time and creating compilation bloat. Rust chose to ignore this problem, by relying on LLVM backend for optimizations and dead code elimination.

Hold up, did the members actually push this forward or was support just often memed about and suddenly this proposal was made: https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/43651-type-parameters.md

As far as I can tell, the consensus for generics was "it will happen, but we really want to get this right, and it's taking time."

I know some people did the knee-jerk attacks like "Go sucks, it should have had generics long ago" or "Go is fine, it doesn't need generics". I don't think we ever needed to take those attitudes seriously.

> Will error handling be overhauled or not?

Error handling is a thorny issue. It's the biggest complaint people have about Go, but I don't think that exceptions are obviously better, and the discriminated unions that power errors in Rust and some other languages are conspicuously absent from Go. So you end up with a bunch of different proposals for Go error handling that are either too radical or little more than syntactic sugar. The syntactic sugar proposals leave much to be desired. It looks like people are slowly grinding through these proposals until one is found with the right balance to it.

I honestly don't know what kind of changes to error handling would appear in Go 2 if/when it lands, and I think the only reasonable answer right now is "wait and find out". You can see a more reasonable proposal here:

https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/go2dra...

Characterizing it as a "lack of vision" does not seem fair here--I started using Rust back in the days when boxed pointers had ~ on them, and it seemed like it took Rust a lot of iterations to get to the current design. Which is fine. I am also never quite sure what is going to get added to future versions of C#.

I am also not quite sure why Go gets so much hate on Hacker News--as far as I can tell, people have more or less given up on criticizing Java and C# (it's not like they've ossified), and C++ is enough of a dumpster fire that it seems gauche to point it out.

There will almost certainly not be a Go 2 in that sense. There is a Go 2 transition doc which extensively discusses what "Go 2" means. The conclusion is

As it says on that page - those were not proposals. They were draft ideas to get feedback on. You can see the list of proposals in this repository: https://github.com/golang/proposal

Approximately a year ago we faced with a necessity of limiting Go runtime memory consumption and started work on our own memory limiter. At the same time, Michael Knyszek published his well-known proposal. Now we have our own implementation quite similar to what has been released in 1.18, but there are two key differences: