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Either that's factually incorrect or we have a disagreement about what "specialization" means. In my mind, "specialization" means ad-hoc polymorphism. That is, you can change the behavior of a generic function, depending on its instantiated types. C# does not have this. However, that does not mean that you get the same machine code for both object and reference types. As an optimization, when you use a template in C#, code is generated for the instance you are actually using. For value types, this means that the code will not box or unbox. This is clearly not specialization, at least by the definition I'm using, but it also avoids unboxing. > The interesting question is how does .NET compile the generic IL of the server to machine code. It turns out that the actual machine code produced depends on whether the specified types are value or reference type. If the client specifies a value type, then the JIT compiler replaces the generic type parameters in the IL with the specific value type, and compiles it to native code. However, the JIT compiler keeps track of type-specific server code it already generated. If the JIT compiler is asked to compile the generic server with a value type it has already compiled to machine code, it simply returns a reference to that server code. Because the JIT compiler uses the same value-type-specific server code in all further encounters, there is no code bloating. from https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms379564(v=vs.80).a... Also this gem, > Because the generic code does not force the boxing and unboxing of value types, or the down casting of reference types, performance is greatly improved. |