Lack of generics was the biggest challenge in using Go, according to the annual survey of Go developers, Info World reports. Although Go already has generics, the biggest challenges that programming language developers face are error handling and learning best practices, according to the latest edition of the survey.

In the January edition of this year’s Go Developer Survey, 5,844 Go developers were asked to share how they use the language, what their biggest challenges are in using it, and what their top priorities are for future improvements to the language.

Error handling, the readability and verbosity of errors in Go, and the difficulty in learning Go programming best practices were the most commonly reported challenges. Generics, which simplify coding by allowing developers to write functions that are independent of the types used, officially appeared with Go 1.18 in March 2022. After that introduction, comments about generics waned.

Other survey results indicate that maintainers of Go’s open source modules report challenges in keeping dependencies up-to-date and avoiding outages due to version changes and downtime. It is expected that this area will be investigated further to help maintainers ensure a stable and robust ecosystem. The survey also found that novice Go developers are interested in using Go for web development.