Linked by Rüdiger Klaehn on Thu 5th Aug 2004 05:00 UTC
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 also fail to see how C++ could be considered as dynamic as C# or Java (I'm a java guy so I'll stick with it in this discussion). To me dynamic means e.g. initializing a class where only a name is known, inspecting objects. I see some cumbersome workarounds (shared libraries are kind of) but for the runtime analysis and dynamic invocation of arbitrary objects I don't see any simple approach in C++. [If your point is that everything can be implemented in assembler that can be implemented in any other language then I'm fine with that argument, but certainly calling assembler object oriented or the like would make you appear a bit strange...]
How would you describe templates briefly? I think Eugenia's sentence has some valid points: Template instantiation happens at compile time (in contrast to c#). Instances of templates do not share a common type (whereas java generic types have more relation [wilcard operator]).