> 2. We will do heaps and heaps of work over many years until we get something we like.

I suppose repeatedly suffering the pain of not having generics until you finally get enough of your community to admit generics aren't just bloat can be described as "heaps and heaps of work". ;)

I'd love to hear what meaningful differences you think exist between early proposals for Go generics, and later proposals for Go generics. Or Go generics and generics which had existed in other languages for decades, for that matter.

The result of this silly delay will be felt basically forever, because millions of lines of go were written with error codes, which could have been much-less error-prone option types. I'm not sure it would even be a good idea to start using option types at this point because it would create such inconsistencies in codebases.

> Also, AFAIK Go is not a single-pass compiler, at least not in the way I learned about compilers.

Correct! But it was single pass and that was very important because multiple passes were bloat. But multiple passes aren't bloat any more, because now Go has multiple passes and Go doesn't have the bloat of other languages. See how that works?

"The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eurasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia."