Proposal: generics (and some other stuff) for Objective-C

Some time ago, Greg Parker asked the Twitternets what we’d like to see in a purely hypothetical Objective-C-without-the-C language. Someone — I believe it was Landon Fuller — pointed at an article about the Strongtalk type system for Smalltalk. I quite like the idea of Objective-C-without-the-C (i.e., a language that is native to the Objective-C object system and runtime without the baggage of C), but after reading that article I found myself asking why we couldn’t do something similar in Objective-C.

I don’t think my random musings have much influence on the design of the language, but if I don’t write it down nobody’s going to know how nuts I am, so here’s a semi-concrete proposal for contextual types and generics for Objective-C. Since anyone even mentioning generics in the vicinity of Objective-C will inevitably be flamed for trying to turn it into C++, this is followed by an aside entitled Why This is Not the Baby-eating Spawn of Bjarne Stroustrup. (Nothing personal, Bjarne.)