On Sun, 19 Jul 2020, at 2:08 AM, Ian Lance Taylor wrote: > On Sat, Jul 18, 2020 at 12:19 AM Tyler Compton <xavi...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > I'm beginning to think that community members (like myself) can't > > reasonably be expected to put in the necessary effort to champion a sizable > > language change. I think it was Ian who made multiple generics draft > > proposals just to reject them himself, then Ian and Robert Griesemer spent > > more untold hours writing the contracts draft design only to have that > > rejected as well. For people outside the core Go team, these probably would > > have been unpaid hours. It's hard to justify spending that kind of time > > when there's such a high chance that the proposal may not amount to > > anything. I think it's for this reason that community proposals are usually > > nowhere near as fleshed out as the draft proposals we've been getting from > > the core team. > > In fairness, though, there is no language change proposal that is as > large as generics. The changes that were made in recent releases were > much smaller. (And, for what it's worth, they did not all come from > Googlers; e.g., https://golang.org/issue/12711, > https://golang.org/issue/19308, https://golang.org/issue/29008.) >
I think the multidimensional slices proposal (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/6282 and several spawned from there) is an example of a major proposed change that the community put great effort into with multiple detailed specifications. There is an asymmetry of time and expertise at play here. I suspect many people would use and benefit from native matrices in Go but the number of people with the necessary skills to design the spec and the amount of available time to devote to it is vanishingly small. We need a way for knowledgable experts to be able to take a sabbatical or similar to spend time refining and guiding their proposal with the Go team. Is this something that the Go project or another corporate sponsor could help with? Ian -- 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. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/37ed3f4e-460f-48b6-a636-61d3eadc5c8a%40www.fastmail.com.
