C# informations

Benefits of Generics 

Generics allow programmers to author, test, and deploy code once, and then reuse that code for a variety of different data types. While this is true of the first Stack example as well, the second Stack example allows your program to reuse code with a negligible performance impact to its applications. For value types, the first Stack example imposes a significant performance penalty, whereas the second Stack example eliminates the penalty entirely because you have eliminated boxing and downcast.

In addition, generics are checked at compile-time. When your program instantiates a generic class with a supplied type parameter, the type parameter can only be of the type your program specified in the class definition. For example, when your program created a Stack of Customer objects, it was no longer able to push an integer onto the stack. By enforcing such behavior, you can build code that is more reliable.

Furthermore, the C# implementation of generics reduces code bloat when compared to other strongly-typed implementations. By creating typed collections with generics, you can avoid the need to create specific versions of each class while retaining the performance benefits of doing so. For example, your program can create one parameterized Stack class and avoid having to create an IntegerStack to store integers, a StringStack to store strings, or a CustomerStack to store Customer types.

This, of course, leads to code that is more readable. By creating one Stack class, your program can encapsulate all behavior associated with a stack in one convenient class. Then, when you create a Stack of Customer types, it is still obvious that your program is using a stack data structure, albeit with Customer types stored within it.