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Java Generics, Type Erasure, and a conceptual idea: reified generics as a first-class citizen?

DEV Community·Luis Vasquez·25 days ago
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#java#jdk#generics#programming#type#class
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Java chose type erasure in Java 5 for valid reasons: binary compatibility, massive enterprise ecosystem, millions of existing libraries. The decision was probably correct at the time. But we're still paying the cost today, and what's interesting is that the modern JVM ecosystem increasingly depends on real runtime type metadata that type erasure originally discarded. Frameworks like Jackson, Hibernate, Spring, Quarkus, Micronaut, gRPC, Kafka serializers, Bean Validation, OpenAPI, and virtually any code generation tooling end up artificially reconstructing information that type erasure eliminated , using mechanisms like TypeReference , TypeToken , ResolvableType , or complex reflection. The idea Instead of trying to patch the current system, what if Java introduced a new kind of class with full generic reification at runtime ?…

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