Type erasure (or type erasing) is simply the act of removing, hiding, or reducing type information about an object, function, and so on. In the C language, type erasure is used all the time. Check out this example:
int array[10];memset(array, 0, sizeof(array));
In the preceding example, we create an array of 10 elements, and then we use the memset() function to clear the array to all zeros. The memset() function in C looks something like this:
void *memset(void *ptr, int value, size_t num){ size_t i; for (i = 0; i < num; i++) { ((char *)ptr)[i] = value; } return ptr;}
As shown in the preceding code snippet, the first parameter the memset() function takes is void*. The array in our preceding example, however, is an array of ...
