Are generics in Go language truly generic?

No, although the Go language provides a mechanism similar to generics, it cannot be considered a true generic. The Go language provides a mechanism called "interface" that can be used to simulate the functionality of generics. Although this approach can simulate the functionality of generics, it is not as flexible as generics in other programming languages. In the Go language, interfaces can only define methods, not variables or properties, which means that generic data structures cannot be defined in the interface like in other programming languages.

The operating environment of this article: Windows 10 system, Go1.20.4 version, Dell G3 computer.

Generics is a programming concept that allows you to write code without specifying a specific type, but using placeholders to represent the type. This can increase code flexibility and reusability while reducing code redundancy. Generics are widely used in many programming languages, such as Java, C, etc.

However, the Go language did not directly support generics when it was designed. This decision caused some controversy, as generics are considered an important feature in modern programming languages. However, the Go language provides a mechanism called "interface" that can be used to simulate the functionality of generics.

In the Go language, an interface is an abstract type that defines a set of methods. By using interfaces as parameters or return values ​​of functions, you can achieve a similar effect to generics. This allows for unified operations on different types of data without having to write separate code for each type.

For example, suppose we have a function that calculates the sum of two numbers. Without using generics, we may need to write multiple functions to handle different types of values, such as int, float, etc. But by using interfaces, we can define a general function that accepts parameters of any type for calculation.

type Adder interface {
    Add() float64
}
func Sum(a, b Adder) float64 {
    return a.Add() + b.Add()
}

In the above example, we defined an Adder interface, which contains an Add method and used it as a parameter of the Sum function. By implementing the Adder interface, we can use the Sum function to calculate the sum of different types of data.

Although this approach can simulate the functionality of generics, it is not as flexible as generics in other programming languages. Because in Go language, interfaces can only define methods, not variables or properties. This means that we cannot define generic data structures in interfaces like in other programming languages.

In addition, the interface implementation of the Go language is based on dynamic dispatch, which means that the specific interface implementation type is determined at runtime. This is different from generics in statically typed languages, which can determine the specific generic type at compile time. This also leads to some performance losses in the Go language.

Although the Go language provides a mechanism similar to generics, it cannot be considered a true generic. It is just a way to simulate generics through interface implementation. Compared with generics in other programming languages, there are still some limitations in functionality. However, the design philosophy of the Go language is to be concise and easy to understand. The introduction of generics may increase the complexity of the language. Therefore, there are currently no official plans to directly support generics in the Go language.

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