I wrote a similarly-themed (although much less complete and much less useful) package for Go called 'Proto' which essentially sidesteps the static typechecker by mapping the 'base useful type' to `interface{}`, which is philosophically similar to `void *`.

I personally have no problem with it (other than the syntax needed to unbox/rebox values). I find that having the freedom to use a type system or not a very compelling feature in a language.

That being said, I understand why it might sit very poorly with some.

Though in Go, you can always use reflection to get back the concrete type in an `interface{}` type. In C, `void *` is pretty much all you get. This causes far more subtle bugs, IMO.

Source: someone who hasn't done much C and only a little bit of Go. So take it with a grain of salt.

In Cello, however, all types are supposed to start with a type declaration, so that you can get the type back at runtime.

random question: doesn't ObjC define 'nil' (or self?) as 'void*'? I did some ObjC coding 2 years ago and I remember seeing something like this and thinking: oh boy.

The ’id’ type is a void *. It is used extensively, whenever there are multiple possible return types. Even where inheritence could have been used to make it more speciffic.

For example, ’alloc’ and all ’init’ returns it.

> The ’id’ type is a void .

non

  typedef struct objc_class *Class;
  typedef struct objc_object {
      Class isa;
  } *id;

with

  struct objc_class {
      Class isa;
      /* objc v1 members omitted */
  };

Nil is (void *)0.