[enricosada]

Is already at the beginning of the article, but should be more visibible how MS Research and Don Syme seen the opportunity to add generics (neeeded for F#) and added that. With design already supporting later addition like variance.

Not just the design, the real implementation too in the existing already complex CLR codebase. And that include lot of areas like NGEN, AppDomains, etc, so is no small feat at all, for a production ready framework already used by lot of developers.

I am programming in .NET Framework from v1.0, the v2.0 (with generics) was a clear cut, so is not something you can add too late because it become pervasive in the framework who leverage it in the design (generics in v2.0, LINQ in v3.0, TPL and Async v4.0) As a note, .NET continue to support non generic collections for backward compatibility, but usage is deprecated.

Really interesting piece of .NET history in https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2011/03/15/netc-gener...

[matthewwarren]

> Is already at the beginning of the article, but should be more visibible how MS Research and Don Syme seen the opportunity to add generics (neeeded for F#) and added that. With design already supporting later addition like variance.

I definitely agree, that's why I put it right at the start of the post :-)