On 26/07/2010 05:32, Sean Kelly wrote:
C# generics are a heck of a lot nicer than Java generics, but there also I think there were other practical reasons for the decision that they didn't fully address. C# is effectively the native language for .NET, and so its libraries should be as useful as possible to other languages compiled to CLR bytecode. If C# used C++ style templates, C++ would integrate well with it, but no other languages really would. Try telling some Visual Basic programmer that they have to define a different container interface for each stored type and see if they use your library. The "Binary Compatibility" section mentions this, but only briefly.
Why is that? (my C# knowledge is very rusty) Is it because they maintain some runtime information unlike Java generics which are completely erased?
-- Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
