How Golang Generics Empower Concise APIs

You’ve likely heard and read dozens of stories about generics in Go about ordinary slices and maps but haven’t yet thought about a fun way to apply this feature. Let’s implement the peer of pandas.read_html, which maps HTML tables into slices of structs! If it’s achievable even with Rust, why shouldn’t it be with Go?! This essay will show you a thrilling mix of reflection and generics to reach concise external APIs for your libraries.

First, let’s look at the direct inspiration for this article — the most popular interactive data analysis library, Pandas: reading HTML seems to be so common that it’s deemed a commodity and thus, works outside of the box:

To follow the idiomatic table parsing example, let’s aim at taking S&P 500 list from Wikipedia and turn it into a slice of Ticker instances, where we annotate every column with a table header name: