One of the most awaited features of Microsoft .NET 2.0 is generics. Generics promise to increase type safety, improve performance, reduce code duplication and eliminate unnessecary casts. The most obvious application of generics in the framework class library are the generic collections in the new System.Collections.Generic namespace. Much has been written about those, but they are not the topic of this article.
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I noticed I made a mistake: polymorphic IL opcodes wouldn't eliminate the need for special cases for each of the primitive types, since they must also be stored as their concrete unboxed types (otherwise boxing overhead becomes a problem).
I noticed I made a mistake: polymorphic IL opcodes wouldn't eliminate the need for special cases for each of the primitive types, since they must also be stored as their concrete unboxed types (otherwise boxing overhead becomes a problem).
Rich