I often wonder about that - if I was going to write by hand I might end up extracting a simple interface, do some type coercion/promotion or some other trick to

I often wonder about that - if I was going to write by hand I might end up extracting a simple interface, do some type coercion/promotion or some other trick to reduce the number of functions I need to write. I read about how .Net does Generics at the VM level and was very impressed, a good compromise between C++ "macro expansion" and Java "type erasure", both of which seem extreme. At the end of the day, though, when generics are present I stop worrying and just use List<int>, List<float>, List<char>, etc. without a second thought. The compiler, VM or runtime can deal with it although I might get punished in some way.