Templategeneric

Templategeneric is a term used to describe a programming approach that blends template-based polymorphism with generic programming. It emphasizes designing software components that are parametric in types, values, and even other templates, with the aim of achieving high reuse and strong type safety without sacrificing performance.

Core idea and scope

The core idea of templategeneric design is to make components configurable through multiple layers of parameters: type parameters (such as T), non-type parameters (such as a size or a policy tag), and template-level parameters (templates themselves). This enables building highly abstracted abstractions that can be specialized for a wide range of use cases. A common practice in templategeneric design is to use template template parameters, where a higher-level template accepts another template as its argument, enabling policy-based, plug-and-play composition.

Typical patterns and examples

A typical templategeneric pattern is a container or algorithm that is parameterized by a data type and by a behavior template. For example, in languages that support template templates, one can define a component like a generic holder that accepts a template Container and a template Policy, for example: template <template <typename> class Container, typename T, template <typename> class Policy> class Widget { Container<T> data; Policy<T> policy; }; This illustrates how templates can be composed to separate concerns and maximize reuse.

Language support and limitations

Templategeneric design is most closely associated with languages that support templates and template templates, notably C++. Other languages provide generics and meta-programming features but may not support passing templates as parameters. The approach often increases code expressiveness at the cost of greater complexity and longer compile times, and it relies on careful design to maintain readability and maintainability.

See also generic programming, templates, template meta-programming, template template parameters, concepts.