Plurrrr

Go 1.18 is going to be released with generics support. Adding generics to Go was a multi-year effort and was a difficult one. Go type system is not a traditional type system and it was not possible just to bring an existing generics implementation from other language and be done. The current proposal was accepted after years of user research, experiments and discussions. The proposal got iterated a few times during the implementation phase. I found the final result delightful.

Everyone is excited that after a decade or so of devs asking for generics, the Go programming language is getting generic types and functions in Go 1.18 in Q1 2022. Generics are no doubt going to lead to a lot of experiments, some good, some bad, some just weird. Go 1.18 is also poised to lead to an increase in software reliability by including fuzzing as part of the standard testing package. But today, I want to look at some minor changes in Go 1.18 that might otherwise get lost in all the excitement around the marquee features.

The article attempts to explore Golang’s “C” package which allows invoking C code from Golang. Before we get into the idea of invoking C code from Golang, let’s see a use-case where this might be needed.

Friday, December 17, 2021, marked the thirty-fourth birthday of the Perl programming language, and coincidentally this year saw the release of version 5.34. There are plenty of Perl developers out there who haven’t kept up with recent (and not-so-recent) improvements to the language and its ecosystem, so I thought I might list a batch. (You may have seen some of these before in May’s post “Perl can do that now!”)