alt Hacker News> For Go, I wouldn't say that the choice to avoid generics was either intentional or minimalist by nature. From what I recall, they were just struggling for a long time with a difficult decision, which trade-offs to make.
Indeed, in 2009 Russ Cox laid out clearly the problem they had [1], summed up thus:
> The generic dilemma is this: do you want slow programmers, slow compilers and bloated binaries, or slow execution times?
My understanding is that they were eventually able to come up with something clever under the hood to mitigate that dilemma to their satisfaction.
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Ironically, the latest research by Google has now conclusively shown that Rust programmers aren't really any "slower" or less productive than Go programmers. That's especially true once you account for the entire software lifecycle, including production support and maintenance.
I’m not sure there’s anything clever that resolved the issues, they just settled on slow execution times by accepting a dynamic dispatch on generics.