I think in the case of JSON, it was “good enough”. People who found this to be a problem would use one of the many 3rd party options.

I kind of like that the standard library doesn’t move fast. It makes it easier to fit the ecosystem into my head (unlike, for example, the JavaScript ecosystem where I find code doesn’t survive 2 years before failing to compile).

But I do agree that slow and steady produces its own problems. Your example of generics is a good one. But think the example of Go modules is another, perhaps even better, example of how sometimes the Go team really should have accelerated their efforts on.

For like 99% of use cases encoding/json was fine. Of course improvements are welcomed. But personally I've lead development of the backend of part one of the biggest sites of its kind in the world, and we just used encoding/json and net/http. Most of our use cases are just building APIs, client facing ones, internal ones, trusted third-parties. These systems have pretty high throughput, more than most people will ever work on.

Within our company I saw people in other teams writing their own optimised JSON libraries for whatever hellish reason. I always reiterated the point that as soon as that app made a single IO request all those nanosecond savings are invisible. Yes, it affects your total CPU time for processing a request but compute was never ever a limitation for us and it's likely not a limitation for most people. And if the trade off is your app needs scale slightly larger versus writing custom JSON code or pulling in a third party dependency, then I'm accepting the larger scaling.

The biggest benefit of encoding/json/v2 isn't the speed, it's the improved API.

Go is an incomplete language masquerading as a simple one.

> generics (something that I still haven't used beyond the tutorials) took an age as well

Only about a year from when the Haskell guys lent their expertise in designing it and it landing in a release. That's actually fairly quick given that it was a pretty significant change under the hood and constrained by only two releases annually.

The Go team was always clear that they didn't have the necessary capabilities internally, despite a lot of failed efforts trying anyway, and were relying on the open source community to lend a hand. Unfortunately, open source doesn't mean open willingness to contribute. It turns out that for all the experts on HN, posting "go doesn't have generics lol" was preferable to helping out.