golang why don't we have a set datastructure

data-structures go set
anjanb picture anjanb · Dec 1, 2015 · Viewed 94.1k times · Source

I'm trying to solve "The go programming lanaguage" exercise #1.4 which requires me to have a set. I can create a set type but why doesn't the language come with one ? go, having come from google, where guava also originated, why didn't the language designers opt for adding support for fundamental data structures ? why force your users to create their own implementations for something so basic as a set ?

Answer

Vatine picture Vatine · Dec 1, 2015

Partly, because Go doesn't have generics (so you would need one set-type for every type, or fall back on reflection, which is rather inefficient).

Partly, because if all you need is "add/remove individual elements to a set" and "relatively space-efficient", you can get a fair bit of that simply by using a map[yourtype]bool (and set the value to true for any element in the set) or, for more space efficiency, you can use an empty struct as the value and use _, present = the_setoid[key] to check for presence.

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