There's no generalized solution to every generic problem. The "cast to interface{}" is the closest to a linear mapping of generics, but if you're reaching for that all the time, you're doing it wrong. So the only sane answer is, "it depends".

The only use case that I have encountered that is essentially impossible in Go is the "generic data structure". Mind you, that's a bit of a big deal, even if it covered over by "generic" arrays and maps (which, further, does cover over a lot of the cases), but it is also the only case where it is actually a problem. Despite the fact Go is not functional, like, at all, I still find myself using my functional training in minimizing the surface area of an "object" as much as possible incredibly useful when programming in Go. I think if I were only an OO programmer trying to come over to Go I'd have a much harder time of it.

Most of the rest of the time you can solve your problem by asking what the code is really trying to do, pull that up into an interface, and carry on. A substantial portion of the rest of the use case can be covered by providing wrapper objects that compose in another object, probably using an interface as the composition point.

I think in practice, about 80% of the problems that people trying to jam generics into Go are encountering are because they are trying to program C++, Java, or C# in Go. Despite their substantial superficial similarities, Go is not any of them, and idiomatic answers differ substantially. Let me rhetorically underline that... Go really looks like a Java or C# clone if you just read down the bullet points, but there are enough important differences that it's a substantially different experience to program in it. Trying to program Go as C# is only slightly less frustrating than trying to port FP idioms into Go (which is a complete waste of time). The remaining 20% are real problems that Go hasn't got a good answer for beyond duplicating code.

Now. All that said, despite the fact that people not used to idiomatic Go are significantly overstating the problem that is the lack of generics, it is a problem and were I in charge, I'd be trying to work something out on this front. (I actually have a proposal I've probably put about 4 or 5 hours of thought into. In defense of the Go developers, this is a nontrivial problem when you stop just waving the word "generic" around and start trying to seriously create an implementable suggestion, accounting for all the use cases, grammar interactions, semantics, etc.) My best argument is that for a language as mature as Go, this is embarrassing: http://golang.org/pkg/container/ Those are the "generic" containers in the standard library that ship with the language.... all three of them as of this writing, plus array and map. At this point that ought to be significantly richer.

(So, that ought to just about piss everybody off...)

Oh, I ought to add for context that I'm actually pretty fluent in Haskell, and my primary work programming language up to this point have been dynamic languages (Perl, Python, etc). So it's not like I'm not comfortable with generics or incapable of understanding how to use them or anything. If anything, I dare say my openness to other answers and then finding ways to express them in Go may be part of why this doesn't bother me too much. There are other options, most of the time, and they are not generally "compromises", either... they are often perfectly sensible options, or even better options than are available in other languages on a bang/buck basis, such as the trade for making composition very easy and inheritance something fairly difficult.