And chasing that thread leads to this explanation from someone who was in the room when the decision was made:
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/5tfx7i/comment/ddmo4ug/?context=3 On Sunday, November 30, 2025 at 4:56:56 PM UTC-5 Sean Liao wrote: > https://go.dev/issue/41130 > > - sean > > On Sun, Nov 30, 2025 at 8:36 PM Alexander Shopov <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > > Hi all, > > > > Go 1.26 is expected early next year and it contains a change in the > semantics of the built-in function `new`. Apart from taking a type, new now > can take a literal and return a pointer to a value represented by the > literal. > > > > Has there been a discussion (ever) of changing the behavior of the > `delete`/`clear` functions so that they can return a boolean indicating > whether they actually deleted something? > > > > In some cases it is nice to have an indication whether these functions > actually deleted anything. > > > > One can achieve this with an additional line of checking whether the > values they act upon contain a particular value (for delete) or any value > (for clear). But in a similar way new with literal also saves a single line. > > > > Does that make sense? Is there any interest in such a feature? > > > > Kind regards: > > al_shopov > > > > -- > > 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 [email protected]. > > To view this discussion visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/CAP6f5MkTiDsq_81r5JbUOkh5g0r74%2B8W2KJGY6BBORvmneuMbA%40mail.gmail.com > . > -- 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/554e4818-92cf-4f1d-bf53-e5d2ed2d4545n%40googlegroups.com.
