[josephg]

I’m so conflicted on that point. I’ve been writing a high performance CRDT in rust for the last few months, and I’m leaning heavily on generics. For example, one of my types is a special b-tree for RLE data. (So each entry is a simple range of values). The b-tree is used in about 3-4 different contexts, each time with a different type parameter depending on what I need. Without genetics I’d need to either duplicate my code or do something simpler (and slower). I can imagine the same library in javascript with dynamic types and I think the result would be easier to read. But the resulting executable would run much slower, and the code would be way more error prone. (I couldn’t lean on the compiler to find bugs. Even TS wouldn’t be rich enough.)

Generics definitely make code harder to write and understand. But they can also be load bearing - for compile time error checking, specialisation and optimization. I’m not convinced it’s worth giving that up.

[tptacek]

If we can be at a place where reasonable people can disagree about generics, I'm super happy, and think we've moved the discourse forward. There are things I like about generics, particularly in Rust (I've had the displeasure of dealing with them in C++, too). They're just not an unalloyed good thing.