Introducing template metaprogramming comes with its own passel of problems: compile times (and code size) can explode, and then there are the difficult-to-debug error messages if you screw up. Because Smalltalk uses latent types, these decisions are deferred till run time, which is a loss for static analysis, but doesn't require a separate generated bit of code for every combination of arbitrary types used in the program, and it can be debugged on the spot without recompiling much more than a single method.
> Introducing template metaprogramming comes with its own passel of problems: compile times (and code size) can explode, and then there are the difficult-to-debug error messages if you screw up
I don't know any even remotely large recent C++ project that does not use templates at some point. Templates are central to C++ since Alexandrescu's book and the main point around which the current language revolves.
Template meta-programming is a different usage from template generics. It has a higher compile time cost because it performs computations as a side-effect of compilation.
Which is what the commenter above was trying to say, templates are completely normal, vanilla C++. Also, I cannot think of any codebase that is actively under development and doesn't use some template magic, like at least tuples or variadic perfect forwarding etc... If you look at old codebases you can find them, but template metaprogramming is still very common, mainstream C++.
