CS102: Introduction to Computer Science II

Support for the generics, or "containers-of-type-T" was added to the Java programming language in 2004 as part of J2SE 5.0. In Java, generics are only checked at compile time for type correctness. The generic type information is then removed via a process called type erasure, to maintain compatibility with old JVM implementations, making it unavailable at runtime. For example, a List<String> is converted to the raw type List. The compiler inserts type casts to convert the elements to the String type when they are retrieved from the list, reducing performance compared to other implementations such as C++ templates.