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Type-erased generic functions for C: A modest non-proposal
Earlier this year, I read Martin Uecker's proposal N3212 to add parametric polymorphism to C. It's easy to scoff at the idea of adding generic programming to plain C, when C++ already has templates, a…
I think the combination of type-erased generics, paired with a default argument mechanism to collect situationally-appropriate metadata at call sites, could provide a surprising amount of expressivity, allow for better type checking to be retrofitted to existing C interfaces. The default argument mechanism works well for populating metadata parameters from builtin operations like sizeof and alignof, but C as it exists today doesn't provide a way to make open, user-defined associations between types and values. This might be a half-baked idea, but hopefully I've demonstrated that there's some potential here for a generics design that isn't in conflict with some of the nice implementation properties of plain C, preserving the ability to do separate compilation without requiring any additional runtime support.
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