Google’s Go language could get generics in 2021
Developers of Google’s Go language are moving forward with plans to introduce generics into the language, with the capability potentially arriving in August 2021, if all goes well. The lack of generics, meaning a function or type that takes type parameters, frequently has been cited as a shortcoming of Go.
Generics would be included in the Go 1.17 release, due at that time. But that timeline was described as optimistic by Go project developers, who noted unforeseen problems could arise. Generic programming enables the representation of data structures and functions in a generic form, with types factored out. It has been viewed as a mechanism to make some programming tasks simpler but there have been concerns that it could complicate the language.