Models of Generics and Metaprogramming: Go, Rust, Swift, D and More - Tristan Hume
In some domains of programming it’s common to want to write a data structure or algorithm that can work with elements of many different types, such as a generic list or a sorting algorithm that only needs a comparison function. Different programming languages have come up with all sorts of solutions to this problem: From just pointing people to existing general features that can be useful for the purpose (e.g C, Go) to generics systems so powerful they become Turing-complete (e.g. Rust, C++). In this post I’m going to take you on a tour of the generics systems in many different languages and how they are implemented. I’ll start from how languages without a special generics system like C solve the problem and then I’ll show how gradually adding extensions in different directions leads to the systems found in other languages.
One reason I think generics are an interesting case is that they’re a simple case of the general problem of metaprogramming: writing programs that can generate classes of other programs. As evidence I’ll describe how three different fully general metaprogramming methods can be seen as extensions from different directions in the space of generics systems: dynamic languages like Python, procedural macro systems like Template Haskell, and staged compilation like Zig and Terra.
