Why are people so scared of void*? Are there any VM's that don't resort to some form of pointer tagging when implementing dynamic typing?

I don't think people is scared of void*. However, it is pretty easy to introduce memory corruption bugs when it is used in big projects.

I find very wise to avoid it when it is not necessary or when there is an equivalent safer alternative (e.g C++ templates if available and applicable).

In this case however, is not only completely fine but I don't think there is a better way to do it.

BTW, my favourite phrase of the article:

"“… Why do this?” Because I can, of course."

The truly spirit of a hacker :)

Who are these "people" exactly?

Haha I can't stop cracking up! Although it reminds me of when I wrote a ray-tracer in high school. Every reflection distribution function took some kind of void* structure and did something unique with it.

Funny, mine was the exact same.

Ok, so instead of "method not implemented" you get memory corruption. Big deal.