How does D's templated functions implementation differ from generics in C#/Java?

Jacob Carlborg doob at me.com
Sat Aug 8 08:19:48 UTC 2020


On 2020-08-07 23:03, aberba wrote:
> Syntactically they look the same (although D's can do more things) so 
> I'm trying to understand how why in D it's called template but in 
> languages like C#/Java they're generics.
> 
> 
> I guess I have fair understanding of D's code generation but isn't it 
> same as what what is available in those languages too? How are the 
> implementation different?

Objective-C recently added support for generics. It uses the same 
approach as Java, type erasure. Basically the only reason why this was 
added is to make the Swift APIs better and more type safe.

Swift also has quite an interesting implementation of generics. IIRC 
correctly it supports both a more Java like implementation where you 
only get one instantiation and a more D/C++ like implementation where 
the compiler generates one instantiation per type.

This is supposed to give the best of both worlds. Little binary bloat 
and high performance.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg


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