For Scala are there any advantages to type erasure?

Question

I\'ve been hearing a lot about different JVM languages, still in vaporware mode, that propose to implement reification somehow. I have this nagging half-remembered (or wholly im

Answer 1

See Ola Bini's blog. As we all know, Java has use-site covariance, implemented by having little question marks wherever you think variance is appropriate. Scala has definition-site covariance, implemented by the class designer. He says:

Generics is a complicated language feature. It becomes even more complicated when added to an existing language that already has subtyping. These two features don’t play very well together in the general case, and great care has to be taken when adding them to a language. Adding them to a virtual machine is simple if that machine only has to serve one language - and that language uses the same generics. But generics isn’t done. It isn’t completely understood how to handle correctly and new breakthroughs are happening (Scala is a good example of this). At this point, generics can’t be considered “done right”. There isn’t only one type of generics - they vary in implementation strategies, feature and corner cases.

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What this all means is that if you want to add reified generics to the JVM, you should be very certain that that implementation can encompass both all static languages that want to do innovation in their own version of generics, and all dynamic languages that want to create a good implementation and a nice interfacing facility with Java libraries. Because if you add reified generics that doesn’t fulfill these criteria, you will stifle innovation and make it that much harder to use the JVM as a multi language VM.

i.e. If we had reified generics in the JVM, most likely those reified generics wouldn't be suitable for the features we really like about Scala, and we'd be stuck with something suboptimal.