[srean]

> but one throws away the information ...

With the mythical smart enough compiler with god like devirtualizer it would be less of an issue but gratuitous use of virtuals annoys me no end. CRTP isn't that hard for the simple use cases but you are beholden to the god of compiler error messages when things go wrong. One great thing that clang has done (among others) is make g++ get their shit together. Contrary to the popular sentiment I personally find the current crop of g++ error messages more helpful.

[johncolanduoni]

Another big part of the barrier here is the nature of compiled binaries. When you define a public generic function in Rust, the compiler ensures that it keeps enough information in the resulting binary so that the generic can be instantiated. Unless you wanted to massively balloon your headers and compile times, achieving the same with C++ is simply impossible across executables and libraries, and very hard even across object files.