On Sunday, 16 February 2014 at 20:29:04 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
It's not exactly true. What has happened is I spent a LOT of time trying to make my C/C++ compiler fast. That experience has enabled me to design D so it is fundamentally fast to compile, and enabled me to pick an internal design for the compiler that I know will be fast.
Isn't this kind of the point? The Go devs don't have the somewhat unique experience of having written a C++ compiler from scratch to guide them in implementing generics in Go, so it doesn't make practical sense to say "D has fast-compiling generics, so why can't Go?". Just because a good generics system is theoretically possible, doesn't mean it's easy to design. Personally, I think comparing C++ to C shows that no generics is better than poorly designed generics (C++ templates).
