Suggestions for Java Generics Semantics in Java Version 7.0 _ Resurrected (original) (raw)

Florian Weimer fweimer at bfk.de
Thu Jun 18 02:06:11 PDT 2009

2) The reason it is a feature is that many experts - including but not limited to Philip Wadler, Martin Odersky, Gilad Bracha, Joshua Bloch, and Neal Gafter - worked for many years on crafting a generic type system that allowed people to migrate their non-generic clients and libraries smoothly. Reified generics would have made that migration more complex. If you don't know why, find out.

Didn't those people work under the assumption that no VM changes were possible because generics code should run on pre-generics VMs, too?

Obviously, this heavily constrains the solution space. In the end, Java 5 bytecode could not run on pre-Java 5 VMs, so this requirement was somewhat pointless, wasn't it?

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