On: Proposal: Go should have generics

[akavi]

Does all of that have to be implemented every time you want to sort by a new predicate?

If so, that seems like quite a lot of boilerplate, no?

[natefinch → akavi]

Mostly, yes (you can finagle your way out of rewriting Len and Swap if all you need to do is change the Less function, but it's probably not worth it from a code clarity point of view).

In a million lines of code, this costs us approximately 114 extra lines of code beyond the minimum necessary for any language where you need to specify a sort order (assuming you need at least one line of code per type/sort algo to tell the computer how to sort your random list of objects).

So, it depends on what you mean by a "lot".