I’m not making any claims about function overloading in general. Only C#.
It interacts in surprisingly complicated ways with a surprising number of other parts of the language. It causes problems with prospective new features. IIRC there have been a number of bugs in the spec and in the compiler wrt overloading. Given the overall high level of expertise of people working on the spec I would say it’s a bit of a minefield, compared to the rest of the language.
“Overload resolution is the nexus that every feature ends up contributing to. […] All of these things make overload resolution and type interface really really really complex and it’s always a bit of the C# specification that I found hardest to understand […] and it turns out so did the spec designers, because they got it wrong, and we’ve been trying to fix it.”
It interacts in surprisingly complicated ways with a surprising number of other parts of the language. It causes problems with prospective new features. IIRC there have been a number of bugs in the spec and in the compiler wrt overloading. Given the overall high level of expertise of people working on the spec I would say it’s a bit of a minefield, compared to the rest of the language.
Edit: Found a Q&A by John Skeet, https://youtu.be/8UvTdobOiJk?t=1292
“Overload resolution is the nexus that every feature ends up contributing to. […] All of these things make overload resolution and type interface really really really complex and it’s always a bit of the C# specification that I found hardest to understand […] and it turns out so did the spec designers, because they got it wrong, and we’ve been trying to fix it.”