I mean, C11 also has generics, but I would really suggest not using it X). See https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/generic

Of couse, it's a much less powerful feature, there's nothing like interfaces or stuff, just a way to "overload" based on the type.

Thank you. I had no idea that you could do such a thing in C11 preprocessor

_Generic() is not a preprocessor feature, but a "real" language feature (I was confused too when I saw it first though).

The only preprocessor part in the example is mapping the function-like macro 'cbrt(X)' to the language keyword '_Generic(X)'.

i love that zig doesn't have a special syntax for generics, it just allows anything to be resolved at compile-time -- including types. which gives you generics 'for free'.

I've only cursory of Zig, so bear with me. Does this mean that Zig templates are like C++, that is, duck typing? Or is there a notion of constraining the type arguments?

It's duck typed but it's not based on a funky and limited syntax, but rather types at comptime become normal arguments to functions that you can then inspect using normal Zig code.

I wrote a blog post about comptime if you want to learn more: https://kristoff.it/blog/what-is-zig-comptime/

It's duck typed but let's say your "template" takes an integer and divides by two depending on some boolean (perhaps you need to return a lookup table of sometimes half the bitwidth of an integer type). That function called by your template at compile time to maybe-divide-by-two is in the same language as runtime zig, and you could even conceivably call that very same function as a compiled entity in the runtime context.

You can constrain type arguments with a compile-time `if` check, and generate a compile error on violation.