2019 AIM HDC

.NET as other platforms supports generics. They allow us to write strongly typed code just once and reuse it for multiple types. Even though this sounds easy, generics are actually quite complicated under the hood and each platform implements them differently.

We will see different approaches for implementing generics. We will compare reification in .NET, type erasure in JVM and templates in C++. We will see why stronger type system sometimes is less powerful and why casting everything to object can be better then storing a concrete type. We will see what had to be done to support generics in .NET and why they were not available since the very beginning.