[sgarland]

Yes, annotations allows you to use the declared types as they are, no strings.

[FreakLegion]

It turns them into thunks (formerly strings) automatically, an important detail if you're inspecting annotations at run time because the performance hit of resolving the actual type can be significant.

[sgarland]

TIL, thanks! It looks like 3.14 is also changing it so that all evaluations are lazy.