I won't say that's been solved, but extern template is supposed to address it (well, exporting templates was supposed to address it, but that never really got o

I won't say that's been solved, but extern template is supposed to address it (well, exporting templates was supposed to address it, but that never really got off the ground). Borland came up with an approach that instantiated templates multiple times, and then weeded out duplicates. That was relatively easy to implement, so everyone else followed suit. Extern template makes it possible to make sure some instantiations are instantiated only once, so the compiler doesn't have to weed out extra instantiations (I wish I could use "instantiate" fewer times in that description, but I can't see how to pull that off).