You can always role dynamics dispatch yourself

twic · on Jan 3, 2020

Dynamic dispatch is in the language too.

    use core::fmt::Display;
    
    fn show_monomorphic<T: Display>(first: T, second: T) {
        println!("{} then {}", first, second);
    }
    
    fn show_polymorphic(first: &dyn Display, second: &dyn Display) {
        println!("{} then {}", first, second);
    }
    
    pub fn main() {
        show_monomorphic(17, 23);
        show_monomorphic("fnord", "slack");
    
        show_polymorphic(&42, &"quirkafleeg"); // mixed types!
    }

There are things you can do with each that you can't do with the other, but they are often both viable choices.

doboyy · on Jan 3, 2020

If you're doing dynamic dispatch then there is still code that's living for each specialization. Sort of solves linking because symbols don't have to be generated and compile times because you hand write the code.

To be fair, I'm only considering basic data structures and algorithms where you can get away with something like foo(void *ptr, size_t size). Maybe generics is too broad a term for that.