alt Hacker NewsI mean, the core thing is like, you have to have a compiler codebase (and language semantics) that's designed around being able to delay in the first place to be able to even try this, and once you've gotten that in place, well, it's not really about this specific idea anymore.
Would this work better in a language where generics are vtable based by default and only monomorphized as a form of LTO? If you have a Zig style machine IR where function calls are a "fake instruction" you can decide between direct and virtual call at final codegen time.
That would mean generics in shared libraries are possible without hacks but you can always choose to statically link and monomorphize for speed. Libraries could even ship both the vtable based catch all code and specializations for common types as a fast path (but that would probably need a custom dynamic linker).