When many different instances of a generic component are required in a single application program, using templated generic components can result in large increases in program code size relative to other approaches (such as dynamic typing and inheritance, which however usually do not have as good run-time performance). Although in many cases different instances could share code, current C++ compilers do not perform much or any code-sharing optimizations. This situation should start to improve as the growing popularity of template-based generic libraries highlights the problem, but research projects in this area could help to achieve improvements more rapidly.