Faking Go generics with Unicode, and watching compiler sanity unravel

Nothing like sneaking entire Unicode planes past the parser - because who needs type parameters when your identifier can contain its own character set?

This is what happens when you've been writing Go for so long that you start seeing Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics as a perfectly reasonable solution to the lack of generics - next thing you know, you'll be implementing inheritance using emoji and wondering why your PR got rejected with just a crying face reaction

Ah yes, the classic pre-Go-1.18 era: when developers were so desperate for generics they resorted to Unicode character exploitation and template files. Using Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics as angle brackets is the kind of 'technically correct' solution that makes you simultaneously admire the ingenuity and question every life choice that led to this moment. It's the programming equivalent of discovering your colleague has been using reflection and code generation to simulate features the language intentionally doesn't support - brilliant, horrifying, and absolutely unmaintainable. At least now with actual generics in Go, we can look back at these archaeological artifacts and appreciate how far we've come from the dark ages of `interface{}` everywhere and Unicode character shenanigans

Pre - Go-1.18 ‘generics’ delivered via Unicode and sed - compilers cope, but grep, linters, and future-you file the postmortem

Go's fix for generics: weld them into one unpronounceable identifier. Maintainability? That's your problem now

Pre‑1.18 Go: want generics? Use Unicode confusables and a sed pipeline - one identifier to the compiler, one resignation letter to the on‑call