We Got the Generics We Have (2022)

• winforms

  25 4,212 9.3 C#

  Windows Forms is a .NET UI framework for building Windows desktop applications.

  

3. Therefore reified generics are not possible to implement in a backwards compatible way.

Ok, sure, but if you instead a new generic collection types and leave the old ones alone, you don’t have to worry about breaking existing compiled code.

This comment about C# suggests a lack of familiarity with the approach C# took:

> C# made the opposite choice — to update their VM, and invalidate their existing libraries and all the user code that dependend on it.

All of the pre-generic C# libraries continue to exist to this day (ArrayList, HashTable, and the non-generic IEnumerable). Applications that used them never stopped working. New code uses the generic collections (List and Dictionary).

Anyways, I think the costs that Java is currently paying for non-reified generics (reflection, performance, and type safety mentioned in the article) is not worth the backwards comparability with the 20 year old J2SE 1.4. The price C# pays for making a backwards incompatible generics (mostly some minor annoyance when designing a collection class implementing IEnumerable) is worth it at this point.

P.S. ok, I do admit that C# forking the collection library is still causing ongoing maintenance work 18 years later: https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/pull/8673

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