I implemented generics in my programming language
Details
- External ID
- 46269673
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I implemented generics in my programming language
- Website domain
- pages.dev
- Launched
- Dec. 15, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 38
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7767175572519084
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
It took a while to implement, though now I have generic functions working in Axe. Documentation, repository and site attached.
Enrichment
- Theme
- developer tools and programming utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- generics implementation for programming language
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Implementing generics, monomorphization, and compile-time type specialization into an existing programming language compiler requires deep compiler design and type theory expertise.
What it would actually take: Building generics in a native compiler requires modifying the AST, parser, and semantic analysis phases to handle parameterized types and constraint solving. The backend must implement either runtime type dispatch or a full monomorphization engine that clones and specializes intermediate representations (IR) per concrete type, handling nested generics, recursion, and mangled symbol generation.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Haxe, Zig, C++ generics, Java generics, Rust type system
Concerns raised: Implementation is ad-hoc polymorphism, not true parametric polymorphism, Breaks parametricity - functions behave differently based on type, Type-checking then ignoring it with runtime type switching is a code smell, All implementations must be in single source file, Doesn't generate compiler errors for unsupported types
Feature requests: Support separate compilation with explicit instantiations, Compiler errors for unsupported type calls, True parametric polymorphism without type-based branching, Type classes for ad-hoc polymorphism handling
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 59 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #17 of 60 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 47 days after the earliest competitor.
- Genotype: language that compiles to idiomatic TS, Rust and Python · hn · 2026-09-08 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- SharpTS · hn · 2026-01-09 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- G# –> a new dotnet language like Go/Swift/Kotlin with C# interop · hn · 2026-06-15 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Fuse · hn · 2026-08-02 · 121 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Axe · hn · 2025-11-24 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Typical is TypeScript with type-safety at runtime · hn · 2026-01-11 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- ErisLint · github · 2026-09-18 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- The Taka Programming Language · hn · 2025-12-03 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.39
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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