I have recently seen many are complaining about a lack of enums in Go. But
while there are many ways in which I would like to see Go improved, enums
barely even rank on my list of priorities.
The majority of my experience prior to Go was with dynamic languages that did
not have explicit enums, and in working with Go I never really felt that enum
functionality was missing.
That said, what am I missing? What it is about enums that have so many people
clamoring for them in Go? Is it having a textual representation managed by the
compiler that a go:generate cannot solve? Is it having a syntax that allows
treating them like an object with a property, e.g. HttpStatuses.NotFound that
otherwise requires too much boilerplate? Or is it something else?
Further, what can you envision doing with a "proper" enum that you cannot
already do with a custom-typed constant?
Thank you in advance to whoever helps me understand why enums are such as
burning desire for so many developers.
-Mike
> On Mar 3, 2024, at 12:25 AM, Nicolas Serna <serna.nicolas.a...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hello, gophers. Lately I've been working quite a bit with enums as I'm moving
> a C program I had tGo, so I wondered if there was any progress on enums
> proposals and realized that none of them get anywhere without breaking the
> Go1 compatibility.
>
> I've decided to get a bit creative and share with you the proposals I've
> thought of.
>
> The fundamental thing when we talk about the incorporation of "robust enums"
> is, similarly to the case of generics, to propose a syntax extension to the
> language without breaking compatibility with the previous software.
>
> We use enumerations simply to handle states and encapsulate them under a
> name. Therefore I wanted to propose the following syntax:
>
> ```proposal
> const (<ENUM_TYPE>) <NAME> <TYPE> = <VALUE>
> ```
>
> The idea of this syntax is that, roughly speaking, it reminds us of what we
> do when we declare a method, with the only difference that in this case we
> use constant values associated to some "enum type". Then, we should be able
> to call our constants as follows: <ENUM_TYPE>.<CONSTANT_NAME>, the same would
> be true for an already instantiated type.
>
> ```example
> type Statement struct{ /* ... */ }
>
> type StatementTyp int
>
> const (Statement) (
> Prepared StatementTyp = iota
> Success
> Fail
> )
>
> func main() {
> stmt := Statement{}
> fmt.Println(Statement.Prepared) // 0
> fmt.Println(stmt.Success) // 1
> }
> ```
>
> Realistically speaking this doesn't solve much. It just gives us a way to
> encapsulate constants in an "elegant" way and keeps the "const-iota" syntax,
> but little else.
>
> I think it is essential to have an extra way to reference these internal
> values of a type so that we can work with the help of the go-typechecker. For
> this I could only come up with two types of syntax, let's see:
>
> ```prop1
> var bar const <ENUM_TYPE>
>
> func foo(arg const <ENUM_TYPE>) {...}
> ```
> ```prop2
> var foo <ENUM_TYPE>.const
>
> func bar(arg <ENUM_TYPE>.const)
> ```
>
> That would be all, I hope you can give some feedback and know what you think.
> I read in the go2-language-template
> <https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/go2-language-changes.md> that
> it was better to post my ideas in this group instead of making a issue.
>
> Thanks for reading ^^
>
>
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