Are generics slow?
In the TCoffeeAndCode session about "Code Profiling, Optimization, Performance, and Memory Leaks", it has been mentioned that generics are slow. However, no specific details were given, and this topic deserves to be explained in more detail before people start indiscriminately removing generics from their codebases, hoping to gain some speed. You can watch the session replay at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCFZv0I9TUk (minute 56) How generics work In order to understand how generics can impact speed, we need to know how generics work under the hood and why they are useful. The simplest way to explain generics is to imagine you have some particular code you need to run on different types. And to achieve that, you copy-paste the code and replace one type with another and nothing else. This is how generics work in C++, where they are not called generics, but templates. Instead of you having to copy-paste code and replace types, the compiler does that for you. Generic c