What are the risks of explicitly casting from a list of type List<? extends MyObject> to a list of type List in Java?

Question

I think the title should explain it all but just in case...

I want to know what risks and potential issues relating to casting can arise from the following snippet o

Answer 1

You are correct about retrieving objects from typedList, this should work.

The problem is when you later add more objects to typedList. If, for instance, MyObject has two subclasses A and B, and wildcardList was of type A, then you can't add a B to it. But since typedList is of the parent type MyObject, this error will only be caught at runtime.