[Rohansi]

This hasn't been an issue for a long time because nobody uses the non-generic collections anymore. That doesn't help you with your reliance on type erasure though.

If you're up for it you should give it another try. Your example of subclassing GenericType<X> and GenericType<ConcreteClass> may be supported with covariance and contravariance in generics [1]. It's probably not very well known among C# developers (vs. basic generics) but it can make some use cases a lot easier.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/generics/c...

[PaulHoule]

Yeah, I had a chance a few months back when I was the backup programmer in a game development hackathon and my team was developing with Unity which uses C#. It was fun.

People talk about tradeoffs with GC, the worst one is that I've seen an occasional game that has a terrible GC pause, for instance Dome Keeper based on Godot which also runs in .NET. I used play a lot of PhyreEngine (also .NET) games on the Playstation Vita and never noticed GC pauses but I think those games did a gc on every frame instead of letting the garbage pile up.

[Rohansi]

Whether you're programming with a GC or without one it all comes down to profiling and optimization (when required). Using a GC means you need to think about memory allocations and reduce them (when required) because they factor into how long the GC will need to run. C# is a great language for this because it provides a lot of options for removing GC memory allocations from your code entirely (struct types, Span<T>, etc).

Not all GCs are created equally either. Unity, for example, is based on an ancient version of Mono and so it uses the Boehm GC which is significantly slower than the one used by .NET. Godot probably has two GCs because it primarily runs GDScript (their custom language) and only supports using .NET in a separate engine build. They'll all have their own performance characteristics that the developer will need to adjust for.

[uyjulian]

PhyreEngine doesn't use .NET, and it is written in C++ (with optional Lua for scripting). You might be thinking of PlayStation Mobile, which does use .NET for scripting.

[feoren]

Covariance and contravarience is very useful, but it's quite annoying that it can only be used with interfaces and not classes/structs. I write lots of little monoid-like data wrappers like Named<T>, and I have to either go through the hassle of dealing with interfaces for something that shouldn't need it, or I have to abandon covariance. The .NET maintainers seem to think that nobody wants covariance on classes, but it would be very helpful to me.