I wanted to make a mental note at the end of 2015 — “feature freeze”. It won’t happen, I cannot make my mind what is the right choice.
The natural decision would be to copycat C# — each constructed type has its own copy of static fields which allows to use generic static fields. Resharper wiki warns about this approach — “in the vast majority of cases, having a static field in a generic type is a sign of an error” ¹. We can find simpler one in Java (more for historical reasons than technical, but still) — it does not support generic static fields and it shares static fields among all constructed types. Scala takes another angle for the same model — since static data can live only in companion objects and they cannot have type parameters the issue is solved by design. As for Swift it is an open question because as the error message says static fields are “not yet supported in generic types”.
C# has some peculiarities — till now I didn’t figure out why C# makes instances of static constructor (see Accelerated C# 2010 by Trey Nash, p.263). Skila would have to add its own because of static variables in generic methods. I feel really insecure here so I wonder whether C# model is worth the effort?
A memento from C++ world:
The original intention of C++ template support envisioned a use-directed automatic instantiation mechanism that required neither user intervention nor multiple instantiations of the same file. This has proved considerably more difficult to achieve than anyone at the time imagined (see [STROUP94]).
— Stanley B.Lippman, Inside the C++ Object Model
Sure, it is not the same issue, over 22 years passed, nevertheless I still have the chills. Until I have firm knowledge or burning desire for this feature I’d better follow Swift footsteps — not supported. Yet.
¹ I was curious what “vast majority” means so I contacted the author of that entry, Dmitri Nesteruk. As it turned out it doesn’t translate to any numbers, it was just a generalization based on the nature of C# model.
Skila 