Fifteen years ago Python’s GIL wasn’t a big issue. Concurrency was something dismissed as probably unnecessary. What people really was needed was a faster interpreter, after all, who had more than one CPU? But, slowly, as the requirement for concurrency increased, the problems with the GIL increased.

By the time this decade rolled around, Node.js and Go had arrived on the scene, highlighting the need for concurrency as a first class concept. Various async contortions papered over the single threaded cracks of Python programs, but it was too late. Other languages had shown that concurrency must be a built-in facility, and Python had missed the boat.

When Go launched in 2009, it didn’t have a story for templated types. First we said they were important, but we didn’t know how to implement them. Then we argued that you probably didn’t need them, instead Go programmers should focus on interfaces, not types. Meanwhile Rust, Nim, Pony, Crystal, and Swift showed that basic templated types are a useful, and increasingly, expected feature of any language—just like concurrency.

There is no question that templated types and immutability are on their way to becoming mandatory in any modern programming language. But there is equally no question that adding these features to Go would make it more complex.

Just as efforts to improve Go’s dependency management situation have made it easier to build programs that consume larger dependency graphs, producing larger and more complex pieces of software, efforts to add templated types and immutability to the language would unlock the ability to write more complex, less readable software. Indeed, the addition of these features would have a knock on effect that would profoundly alter the way error handling, collections, and concurrency are implemented.

I have no doubt that adding templated types to Go will make it a more complicated language, just as I have no doubt that not adding them would be a mistake–lest Go find itself, like Python, on the wrong side of history. But, no matter how important and useful templated types and immutability would be, integrating them into a hypothetical Go 2 would decrease its readability and increase compilation times—two things which Go was designed to address. They would, in effect, impose a simplicity debt.

If you want generics, immutability, ownership semantics, option types, etc, those are already available in other languages. There is a reason Go programmers choose to program in Go, and I believe that reason stems from our core tenets of simplicity and readability. The question is, how can we pay down the cost in complexity of adding templated types or immutability to Go?

Go 2 isn’t here yet, but its arrival is a lot more certain than previously believed. As it stands now, generics or immutability can’t just be added to Go and still call it simple. As important as the discussions on how to add these features to Go 2 would be, equal weight must be given to the discussion of how to first offset their inherent complexity.

We have to build up a bankroll to spend on the complexity generics and immutability would add, otherwise Go 2 will start its life in simplicity debt.

Next: Simplicity Debt Redux