Why no ICloneable<T>?

c# .net icloneable
Bluenuance picture Bluenuance · Feb 11, 2009 · Viewed 47.7k times · Source

Is there a particular reason why a generic ICloneable<T> does not exist?

It would be much more comfortable, if I would not need to cast it everytime I clone something.

Answer

Marc Gravell picture Marc Gravell · Feb 11, 2009

In addition to Andrey's reply (which I agree with, +1) - when ICloneable is done, you can also choose explicit implementation to make the public Clone() return a typed object:

public Foo Clone() { /* your code */ }
object ICloneable.Clone() {return Clone();}

Of course there is a second issue with a generic ICloneable<T> - inheritance.

If I have:

public class Foo {}
public class Bar : Foo {}

And I implemented ICloneable<T>, then do I implement ICloneable<Foo>? ICloneable<Bar>? You quickly start implementing a lot of identical interfaces... Compare to a cast... and is it really so bad?

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