Generics goals

Pull request

Problem

The “generics” feature of Carbon is a large design effort that needs to be broken up into manageable steps. The first thing we need is a high-level goals document:

• to make sure we agree on the approach we are taking,
• to clearly communicate expectations to contributors for future steps,
• to encourage us to solve problems in the design in a consistent way,
• to provide a yardstick for measuring different alternatives under consideration.

Background

The question of what a generics feature would look like in Carbon has been an ongoing discussion, with many alternative proposals. Of course there have been a number of use cases that we want to address with this feature, but over the course of this process we have discovered a number of desirable properties we would like to achieve with any solution.

Proposal

See the generics goals document.

Rationale

The goals here well reflect Carbon’s goals as applied to the specifics of the generics feature.