Rust still has some room to improve over C++ here. Because it knows up-front which operations generic code can use on its type parameters, it can do things like

Rust still has some room to improve over C++ here. Because it knows up-front which operations generic code can use on its type parameters, it can do things like "polymorphization": https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/69749 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/69749 This means the compiler will automatically detect how much duplication is actually needed ahead of time, eliminating the need for after-the-fact identical code folding. (This should also drastically reduce compile times for some programs!) And it could go even further than that. For example, some code could be duplicated based only on the size+alignment of its parameters (C#-style generics without a JIT). The analysis could be finer-grained than per-function, sharing parts of a function across instantiations (kind of like outlining). With the detection happening this early in the pipeline, the compiler could even tell the user about it and guide them toward techniques that reduce the amount of duplication. (A different language could go further, of course.)