Generics in .Net

I’ve been following with interest various articles that have been published about the addition of Generics to .Net.

When I first saw the template classes in C++ I thought they were incredibly useful and cool - until I saw that they were essentially a trick of text processing. The gloss went right off them then.

In C#/.Net, Generics are going to be a first class concept - supported at runtime, not compile time. This means that if my assembly creates a generic list of Controls, and your assembly also creates a generic list of Controls, then both assemblies will share the same implementation. The consequences of this include a massive reduction in code bloat, not to mention the reduced load on the processor’s code cache.

Brad Adams has posted a short article to his blog detailing the use of Reflection to see how Generics are actually implemented. Interesting stuff.