Proposal: Adding Generic Methods to the Go Programming Language
By
griesemer
Crackling crust, pillowy middle. The kind of bagel that earns a second cup of coffee.
Summary
This article proposes adding generic methods to Go, which would allow methods to declare their own type parameters (not just inherit them from a generic receiver type). Currently, Go supports generic functions but not generic methods. The proposal argues that this limitation is artificial and that allowing methods to have their own type parameters would make Go more expressive and consistent. The author presents a change of perspective on how methods are defined in the language specification, suggesting that the syntactic restriction preventing methods from being generic should be removed.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledPer the current spec, a concrete method is a function with a receiver. Syntactically this is not quite true: while functions can be generic, methods cannot.
For clarity, in the following we use the term concrete method (or just method when the context is clear) to describe a non-interface method declared like a function but with a receiver.
A change of view.
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