This seems like such an obvious idea, but I was unable to find prior discussion about it — it is probably at least implicit in various generics alternative proposals etc, but anyway, seems like it might be worth at least saying why this wouldn’t be useful to provide in standard packages?
Idea: If there were standard packages that provide basic interfaces akin to fmt.Stringer, for ints and floats (and all other basic types), with bidirectional conversion functions, might that go a long way toward filling some of the generics gaps? e.g.: https://play.golang.org/p/v1S1IMigoy6 // in package ints type Inter interface { Int() int64 FromInt(val int64) } func Max(a, b Inter) int64 { if a.Int() > b.Int() { return a.Int() } return b.Int() } so you could write ints.Max(a,b) for anything supporting the Inter interface.. Obviously a Less method would be avail, and could be used for a fully generic sort on slices where you check if the slice element type supports the interface (including Floater and Stringer), and it falls back on a big reflect.Kind switch in the worst case. I just wrote this and it seems ugly but useful when you really don’t know what you’ve got, and having the interface allows you to use things like Time values etc, and is probably faster than fully reflect-based. A similar Floater interface could be defined, maybe in math, and an entire generic version of the math library could be implemented as wrappers using the Floater interface — obviously a bit of runtime cost using the interface methods but seems like it would save a lot of casting and for non-performance-critical cases would probably be worth the cleaner code. If this was all defined as a standard package, then basically every type with relevant int, float, etc semantics could be expected to have the relevant interface methods, just like virtually everything has a Stringer interface, and you could very easily deal with just about any relevant type by defining the relevant interface-based methods.. So anyway, what is the fatal flaw with this idea that I’m not seeing? - Randy -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
