[qppo]

I agree with most of what you're saying here except for the point on generics versus templates. I wouldn't say generics are an approximation of templates at all, templates are something in between generic programming and macros and that leads to them being hazardous, slow, and generally speaking unergonomic.

Rust's generics allow for some seriously powerful abstractions to be built in a very clean and readable way, although there can be friction with stuff that would be simple with templates in C++ and quite verbose in Rust.

Maybe concepts will change that.

[adev_]

> I wouldn't say generics are an approximation of templates

Template (at their origins) are nothing more than generics, and a pretty clean, powerful and zero cost way of doing generics.

What you name "hazardous, unergonomic" macros style is not the template system itself. It is mainly due to all the 2005-styles SFINAE hacks that have been invented by abusing templates properties.

SFINAE in C++ is nothing natural, it's at best a dangerous trick to have compile time resolution/execution.

Fortunately all of that should die progressively with C++-17 constexpr for the good of humankind.

[neutronicus]

Non-type Template Parameters ("const Generics") are on the short-term road-map for Rust. Small step from there to recursion and compile-time factorial.