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The "generics" feature of Carbon is a large design effort that needs to be broken up into manageable steps. The first thing we need is a high-level goals document. The goals here reflect the desirable properties that we have discovered as part of considering several alternative generics designs:
- Use cases:
- Generic programming
- Upgrade path from C++ abstract interfaces
- Dependency injection
- Generics instead of open overloading and ADL
- Performance
- Better compiler experience
- Encapsulation
- Predictability
- Dispatch control
- Upgrade path from templates
- Coherence
- No novel name lookup
- Learn from others
- Interfaces are nominal
- Interop and evolution
- Bridge for C++ customization points
Goals are summarized in [this presentation](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12yGyu5Pvdag7CJp-_yLVkmbhyvuRIilBTNlkO0LKaHo/edit?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-JB9yrUO4-6J8-zzGhnIyNg).
Co-authored-by: Chandler Carruth <chandlerc@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Jon Meow <46229924+jonmeow@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Matthew Riley <mdriley@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: austern <austern@google.com>
Co-authored-by: Dmitri Gribenko <gribozavr@gmail.com>
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1.3 KiB
Generics goals
Problem
The "generics" feature of Carbon is a large design effort that needs to be broken up into manageable steps. The first thing we need is a high-level goals document:
- to make sure we agree on the approach we are taking,
- to clearly communicate expectations to contributors for future steps,
- to encourage us to solve problems in the design in a consistent way,
- to provide a yardstick for measuring different alternatives under consideration.
Background
The question of what a generics feature would look like in Carbon has been an ongoing discussion, with many alternative proposals. Of course there have been a number of use cases that we want to address with this feature, but over the course of this process we have discovered a number of desirable properties we would like to achieve with any solution.
Proposal
See the generics goals document.
Rationale
The goals here well reflect Carbon's goals as applied to the specifics of the generics feature.