Generics in TypeScript

Generics allows us to provide types to other types. Oh wow? It went above my head :)

Let us try to understand from an example.

Here is a code that declares an array of strings.

const arr: string[] = ["Apple", "Banana"];

Now an array of strings can be declared in a different way. Do you know that, TypeScript contains an Array type to declare arrays? Lets try that.

Did you notice the red error line below Array? So what is the issue here?

Array is a generic type. That means, when we use Array type, we also need to tell if it is going to contain a string, number or whatever type we wish. And this is how we provide it.

const arr: Array<string> = ["Apple", "Banana"];

If we want an array that can have either string or number, this is how we do it.

const arr: Array<string | number> = ["Apple", "Banana", 12, 78];