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EdSchouten • today at 5:02 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

Go is often thought of as a successor of C. C doesn't have methods, only global functions. From my perspective, Go added methods primarily so that you can use them in combination with interfaces. Given that interfaces don't support generic methods, I'm personally not convinced that this feature was worth adding.

Replies

munificent • today at 5:29 PM

> From my perspective, Go added methods primarily so that you can use them in combination with interfaces.

They also give you a limited form of overloading. Without methods or overloading, you end up in the situation that C and Scheme are in where every operation on a data structure has to redundantly have the data structure in its name like:

    list_clear(my_list);
    queue_clear(my_queue);
    map_clear(my_map);
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pjmlp • today at 8:25 PM

Well, C has a kind of pseudo generics since C11.

And everyone gets to invent their own vtable implementation since the 1980's.

etse • today at 5:38 PM

What was the reason for interfaces having to work at runtime?