Being confused about when to use generics

Generics in Go are types that can be specified later. Before generics were added to Go, handling similar functionality across types was a chore. With generics we can leverage the following builtin type constraints:

Or we can define a custom constraint:

type customConstraint interface {
  ~int | ~string // this constraint only supports ints and strings
}

int is a restriction to specifically an int while ~int supports all values whose underlying type is int

Mistake

Using generics when it offers no value or when it makes the code too complicated

Fix

Only consider using generics for the following cases:

References