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Go 1.18 is going to be released with generics support. Adding generics to Go was a multi-year effort and was a difficult one. Go type system is not a traditional type system and it was not possible just to bring an existing generics implementation from other language and be done. The current proposal was accepted after years of user research,...

Shard coordination has been one of the bigger challenges to design sharded systems especially for engineers with little experience in the subject. Companies like Facebook have been using general purpose shard coordinators, e.g. Shard Manager, and suggesting that general purpose sharding policies have been widely successful. A general purpose...

Spanner is a distributed database Google initiated a while ago to build a highly available and highly consistent database for its own workloads. Spanner was initially built to be a key/value and was in a completely different shape than it is today and it had different goals. Since the beginning, it had transactional capabilities, external...

Update: The proposal draft has been revisited to use brackets instead of parenthesis. This article will be updated with the new syntax soon. Ian Lance Taylor and Robert Griesemer have been working on a generics proposal for Go for a while. Unlike other proposals, a highly significant language change as such generics will require experimentation...

Spanner is a relational database with 99.999% availability which is roughly 5 mins a year. Spanner is a distributed system and can span multiple machines, multiple datacenters (and even geographical regions when configured). It splits the records automatically among its replicas and provides automatic failover. Unlike traditional failover models,...