Why should I care that Java doesn't have reified generics?

Question

This came up as a question I asked in an interview recently as something the candidate wished to see added to the Java language. It\'s commonly-identified as a pain that Jav

Answer 1

One nice thing would be avoiding boxing for primitive (value) types. This is somewhat related to the array complaint that others have raised, and in cases where memory use is constrained it could actually make a significant difference.

There are also several types of problems when writing a framework where being able to reflect over the parameterized type is important. Of course this can be worked around by passing a class object around at runtime, but this obscures the API and places an additional burden on the user of the framework.