Proposal Alternatives

proposal reviews and mentions

• How Go detects struct copies with sync.noCopy
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Aug 2026

  Ah the usual barrage of links from Go folks, luckily we have also come prepared.

  > In three years of Go surveys, lack of generics has always been listed as one of the top three problems to fix in the language.

  https://blog.golang.org/why-generics

  > In retrospect, we were biased too much by experience with C++ without concepts and Java generics. We would have been well-served to spend more time with CLU and C++ concepts earlier.

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

  And naturally Rob Pike's pearl,

  > think the transition to getting polymorphism into the language through generics is has still got some years to work through there's still things that don't quite work right

  https://youtu.be/yE5Tpp2BSGw?t=2134

• Proposal: Throw as a Special Variable for Auto Error Propagation in Go
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jun 2025

  While I have no experience with go, this seems like an interesting idea. Hackernews however isn't a great place to post this proposal if you want it to be implemented.

  Maybe take a look at https://github.com/golang/proposal and if you want to share your proposal with hn, submit a link to the proposal here.

• Everything about Generics in Go
  1 project | dev.to | 29 May 2025
• The Defer Technical Specification: It Is Time
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Mar 2025

  I know they implemented an optimization back in go 1.13. Not sure if that will help.

  https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/34481-...

• Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang
  16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Nov 2024

  the most basic example was the declined proposal https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/32437-...

  Some people didn't like the "try" keyword it reminded them too much of exceptions, some people didn't like that they couldnt see a return inline (which was the purpose of the proposal in the first place).

  it's not that there are no solutions. the main problem is the go team's insistence to have "one true way" (tm) of doing something and unfortunately this gap between people who want to see every return inline and people who want to see the clean solution separate from the error handling is not something that can be bridged by technical means. the only solution is to implement both ways and lets see which one wins.

• Does Go Have Subtyping?
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Oct 2023

  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...

• Backward Compatibility, Go 1.21, and Go 2
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Aug 2023
• Defining interfaces in C++ with ‘concepts’ (C++20)
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2023

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

• Why Turborepo is migrating from Go to Rust – Vercel
  7 projects | /r/golang | 8 Mar 2023

  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.

• Are you a real programmer if you use VS Code? No Says OP in the byte sized drama
  1 project | /r/SubredditDrama | 24 Jan 2023

  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

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