Microsoft research has a CLI implementation with generics support... At several conferences we have publically said that generics will be added to some future version of .NET. With those two pieces of data, I pose the question - how wide spread should generics be used? Was ATL goodness, or something taken a bit too far?

For those of you unfamiliar with generics, they are basically C++ templates implemented at the runtime level. I'm not a compiler wonk, so I have to go with my most basic understanding - essentially the CLR would do dynamic class generation at runtime, thuse preventing code bloat, but giving you the performance benefit of strongly typed classes. In addition, since the runtime maintains the identity of the class being a generic, features like reflection actually work correctly.