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That's incorrect. It would have been possible to implement reified generics while preserving backward compatibility, Neal Gafter had actually a proposal to do
by hota_mazi 8y ago
That's incorrect.
It would have been possible to implement reified generics while preserving backward compatibility, Neal Gafter had actually a proposal to do just that.
In the end, erasure won simply because it's the superior solution.
- mcculley 8y agoErasure is superior to a system that would be typesafe? Please elaborate.
- eeperson 8y agoHow is reification any more type safe than erasure?
- mcculley 8y agoWould it not have allowed one to seal the loopholes demonstrated in the article?
- hota_mazi 8y agoErasure is just as type safe as reification. Erasure gives you a little less flexibility to express certain constructs than reification allows, but from a type safety standpoint, the two approaches are equivalent. If you want widen the meaning of "type safe" a bit, I would argue that reification is "less" type safe in the sense that it allows you to perform additional runtime type checks / type casts, which basically means you are second guessing the compiler and invalidating all the type soundness that it has provided you by accepting to compile your code.
- mcculley 8y agoIt would not have allowed one to seal the loopholes demonstrated in the article?