How can we talk about high performance when:

* The current "generics" mechanism (interface et al) does runtime introspection, which is just about as slow and unwieldy as it gets * There is no option for pervasive, truly high-performance data structures since everything is a map (which comes with its own type parametrization as an exception to everything else), and if you don't like the hashing algorithm, tough luck. * You have a garbage collector running in the background, which is barely tunable compared to the options other runtimes have

Talking about performance when it's convenient as an argument against generics but disregarding the other holes in the language is not reasonable, because I would say that the choice of implementation for native maps is probably far more important for high performance. Yet here we are, no one complaining.

So we can really discard the performance argument, thus there is now an ample, valid set of choices for generic programming, several of which don't go against the goals of fast compilation.

Speaking of fast compilation; pretty much everything is going to be faster than C++ templates, since the entire compilation chain in C++ is slow.