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.

source: L