Enhancement: Ability to invoke generic methods with explicit type parameters when PowerShell cannot figure out <T> from the context

Please provide ability to invoke generic methods with explicit type parameters.

Steps to demonstrate

[Array]::Empty[string]()

or using a class:

class A {
    static [string] GetTypeName[T]() { return [T].Name }
}

[A]::GetTypeName[string]()

(Array.Empty was chosen as a simplest possible example. In scripts Iʼd use @())

Current behavior

At line:1 char:16
+ [Array]::Empty[string]()
+                ~
Array index expression is missing or not valid.
At line:1 char:16
+ [Array]::Empty[string]()
+                ~~~~~~~
Unexpected token 'string]' in expression or statement.
At line:1 char:24
+ [Array]::Empty[string]()
+                        ~
An expression was expected after '('.
    + CategoryInfo          : ParserError: (:) [], ParentContainsErrorRecordException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : MissingArrayIndexExpression

Ruminations

I understand that itʼs not important to have full support of generics in a scripting language or to have 100% feature parity with C# (I might be wrong, — now we have classes in PowerShell after all 🤔)

Here are some not-very-elegant workarounds from the Interwebs:

• Workaround to call to a generic method OfType<T>() in PowerShell, when PowerShell cannot figure out <T> from the context by @vors
• PSGenericMethods module by @dlwyatt
• Invoking Generic Methods on Non-Generic Classes in PowerShell by @LeeHolmes
• How do I call a parameterless generic method from Powershell v3?

Here are my questions:

• Is it possible to implement this at all? How hard it could be?
• Anyone tried to implement this before?
• Is it worthwhile?

Just posting this here for discussion. Didnʼt find any mentions of this problem in other issues.

[iSazonov]

At first glance, this is not worthwhile because the main asset of PowerShell is to hide complex details - Powershell automatically calls the correct methods.

As for implementation it seems is a lot of work but not so difficult.

[0xfeeddeadbeef]

@iSazonov Problem is that PowerShell can not automatically call correct methods when there is no way to deduce generic type parameter automatically (as seen in “Steps to demonstrate”). It must be specified explicitly. This is true for other CLR languages too. We are forced to dig through all the complex details using reflection (see list of workarounds).