i think the general conclusion from this thread is that generics would be useful because, at the moment, if you want top performance, you need to have type unsafe code in critical loops.
that sounds quite reasonable to me...
...so maybe i am just an arrogant bastard that doesn't think much of fellow programmers. but i suspect that most people, when they complain about generics are not making that argument. they're simply complaining because it's not what they are used to.
as i say, i may be wrong. i may be a horrible man. if people want to convert/improve me i suggest they start making comments that are a bit more nuanced than "i miss generics".
Such as the familiarity of java developers who had to wait for a decade to get generics? The familiarity of C developers where void*? Or the familiarity of Python developers where "whatever"?
This claim doesn't check out.
for example, long ago, i was looking at the source for some of the go libraries and couldn't understand why they had cut+paste code. when i asked on stackoverflow the unaminous answer was "because go doesn't support generics". you can see the discussion here - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6645329/why-does-the-go-i...
BUT if you read that thread, and the discussion under the first answer, you'll see that there is an apparently reasonable solution without generics. that seemed like an obvious approach to me (coming, i guess, more from python and fp), but one that wasn't obvious to anyone answering (coming, i guess, more from java and c).
i have no evidence that this is a general problem, but it surprised me at the time. ever since i have been suspicious of people complaining about the lack of generics (disclaimer: i don't use go myself - when i looked at it i thought that it was clear improvement on c/c++/java, but could have been even better if they had been more open to ideas from fp - http://acooke.org/cute/GoRocksHow0.html ; in other words, i'd be happy to use it at work instead of c (current project), but if i can choose myself i'm more likely to go with a more functional approach).