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by potatosareok2 3849 days ago
Was erasure necessary to maintain backwards compatibility?

Also what are you doing that you need type information at runtime?
2 comments
codingbinary 3848 days ago
Type Erasure is the reason you can't use builtin types as generic arguments. And in a lot of cases it forces you to cast.

And as type erasure happens very, very early in the compilation process, you lose a lot of static type information the compiler could act on or give you warnings.

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dmm 3849 days ago
No it wasn't necessary to maintain backwards compatibility. Type erasure was implemented to allow libraries to upgrade to generics without breaking compatibility with existing applications.
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wtetzner 3849 days ago
How is that not backwards compatibility?
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codingbinary 3848 days ago
The one is on a language level, the other on an application/framework level.
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