Generic là cách để giữ được tính chung chung mà vẫn không bị mất thông tin

To start off, let’s do the “hello world” of generics: the identity function. The identity function is a function that will return back whatever is passed in. You can think of this in a similar way to the echo command.

Without generics, we would either have to give the identity function a specific type:

function identity(arg: number): number {    
    return arg;
}

Try

Or, we could describe the identity function using the any type:

function identity(arg: any): any {
    return arg;
}

While using any is certainly generic in that it will cause the function to accept any and all types for the type of arg, we actually are losing the information about what that type was when the function returns. If we passed in a number, the only information we have is that any type could be returned.

Instead, we need a way of capturing the type of the argument in such a way that we can also use it to denote what is being returned. Here, we will use a type variable, a special kind of variable that works on types rather than values.

function identity<Type>(arg: Type): Type {
    return arg;
}

Try

We’ve now added a type variable Type to the identity function. This Type allows us to capture the type the user provides (e.g. number), so that we can use that information later. Here, we use Type again as the return type. On inspection, we can now see the same type is used for the argument and the return type. This allows us to traffic that type information in one side of the function and out the other.

We say that this version of the identity function is generic, as it works over a range of types. Unlike using any, it’s also just as precise (i.e., it doesn’t lose any information) as the first identity function that used numbers for the argument and return type.

Nguồn:: TypeScript: Documentation - Generics
generic là biến dành cho kiểu