Generics and Advanced Type Inference

Thus far, we have been exploring the type system within TypeScript, and how it relates to interfaces, classes, and primitive types. We have also explored how to use various language features to mix and match these types, including type aliases and type guards. All of the techniques we have used, however, eventually boil down to writing code that will work with a single particular type. This is how we achieve type safety within TypeScript.

But what if we would like to write some code that will work with any sort of type, or any sort of interface or class definition? Perhaps a function that needs to find an element in a list, where the list could be made of strings, or numbers, or any other type. This is where generics come into play. Generics provide a mechanism to write code that does not need to specify a specific type. It is left up to the caller of these generic functions or classes to specify the type that the generic will be working with...