Creating an array of generic collections

Question

Actually, the question should be

Creating an array of generic anything.

Why can\'t the compiler take care of it?

The following would be

Answer 1

Actually Java does create generic array for varargs, so you can do

List[] dtoLists = array(new ArrayList(), anExistingDtoList);

@SafeVarargs
static  E[] array(E... array)
{
    return array;
}

As to why is explicit generic array creation forbidden, it has something to do with type erasure. (The same concern exists in the above solution, but suppressed by @SafeVarargs) However it is debatable; there are different ways to handle the concern, a compiler warning is probably enough. But they chose to outright ban it, probably because arrays are no longer important anyway now that we have generic collections