I agree. I haven't missed generics at all since switching to Go. However that being said, do you think that the upcoming Go 1.18 with generic support is going to increase performance in Esbuild? Just from not having to Unbox every interface{}, or by writing less to the heap? Have you experimented with generics and esbuild?
No, I haven't experimented with generics and esbuild. I hadn't considered whether generics could improve performance or not. Just thinking about it quickly now. I'm not convinced it would because esbuild hardly makes use of interface{}. If someone can demonstrate a noticeable performance improvement then I'd be happy to start using generics for that reason.
The main pattern esbuild uses is an interface with a single dummy method to denote a union type like this: https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/blob/34899aaa1d76acd3b4adc5.... It's used several times and is basically esbuild's core data structure. I'd like to be able to optimize this pattern. Specifically I'd like to avoid each reference to a union type taking up two whole pointers in memory (Go represents interfaces as a pointer to the object and a separate pointer to the method table).
I'm only using the method table as a tag for the tagged union, so ideally it'd be a single byte or something even less expensive like part of the pointer. I don't think generics can help with this? But Go doesn't let you do fancy stuff like this so I'm just leaving it be. A low-level language like C++/Rust could do better here, but that comes at the cost of a significant decrease in productivity, so I'm ok with this trade-off.
